Jim Landwehr memoir Cretin Boy

Note: This post originally appeared at Wisconsin Writers Association on December 14, 2020 https://wiwrite.org/book-reviews/9428543

 

Cretin Boy by Jim Landwehr
Memoir, 185 pages
2020, Burning Bulb Publishing

Reviewer: Greg Peck
$14.99 Print
$3.69 Ebook
Buy on Amazon

About the Book:

Cretin High School, located in Saint Paul, Minnesota was a Catholic, all-male, military academy that brought unique twists to the already difficult high school experience. Cretin Boys, as they were called, were subject to the oppression of both church and state as they navigated the diverse teaching styles of Christian Brothers, military instructors, and lay teachers. Cretin Boy looks at those menial first jobs, takes you dancing with a girl at that first high school formal, and peels down the street in a Corvette-on-loan with a teen at the wheel. It is a coming-of-age story with a military dress code, a coming-to-faith story while smoking in the boy’s room.

Greg's Review:
Jim Landwehr has written two previous memoirs and five poetry collections, but he hits his storytelling stride with a coming-of-age memoir Cretin Boy.

Cretin stands Cretin High School, the Catholic military academy Landwehr attended in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the late 1970s. Webster’s also defines cretin as “a very stupid or foolish person.”

Landwehr and his buddies sometimes live up to that definition.

Narrow escapes from cops while drinking? Check.

Death-defying traffic stunts? Check.

Dimwittedly doling out cash for first-car clunkers? Check.

Still, having grown up among six kids with a single mother after his father died young, Landwehr portrays himself as awkward and introverted, the “good son” and lacking self-esteem.

Using self-deprecating humor, Landwehr details incompetence at shooting guns, driving cars and approaching the opposite sex.

It doesn’t help the latter issue that Cretin is only for boys. Or that Cretin instructors include military officers and many Catholic Brothers, men committed to Christianity who live on campus. Landwehr explains the oddities in describing Brother Gerard.

“He was a frail, senior Brother who was tasked with teaching us Biblical truth while at the same time discussing human sexual anatomy and addressing embarrassing subjects like masturbation, intercourse and birth control. It seemed strange to mix the message of ‘don’t do this’ with ‘but if you do this other thing, then do this.’ It was even weirder because it was coming from someone apparently older than my grandparents, from a man who had pledged himself to a life of celibacy…”

Landwehr uses decades of life experience to put perspective on adolescent escapades. “We were pushing the envelope in our struggle for independence and on our road to adulthood,” he writes.

If there’s one concern, it’s that this book, like many produced by small companies or self-published, needed better proofreading.

Rather than write a chronology, Landwehr organizes stories into chapters such as Marching, Jobs, and Girls. The longest are Vices and Cars.

Maybe the strict combination of church and state discipline drove these boys to mischief beyond their school halls, but readers, regardless of which decade they grew up, will identify with many of these stories and find themselves reminiscing about their own high school days.

Author Jim Landwehr was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He loves outdoor sports, including
biking, kayaking, canoeing, camping and fishing. It was his love of camping in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota that led him to write Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir. The book features humorous accounts of trips he took to the area with his brothers, friends and children over the past twenty five years.

Jim is married to Donna and has two children. He lives and works in Waukesha, Wisconsin as a Land Information Systems Supervisor for Waukesha County. He was the 2018/2019 poet laureate for the Village of Wales, Wisconsin.

Reviewer Greg Peck of Janesville worked for newspapers in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin Rapids and Janesville and won many journalism awards before retiring in 2016. Peck is author of Death Beyond the Willows and the new Memories of Marshall, Ups and Downs of Growing Up in a Small Town. He’s a former board member of the Wisconsin Writers Association and won the WWA’s Jade Ring in nonfiction.

 

Gregory L Renz and Beneath the Flames

 

Beneath the Flames

Gregory Lee Renz

Thriller Fiction, 350 pages

Published June 1, 2019

Three Towers Press

Buy on Amazon 

Barnes and Noble 

$4.99

$12.99-$26.95

About the Book:

BENEATH THE FLAMES is an intimate combination of love, race, and life as an urban firefighter.

A fire in a neighboring farmhouse has young farmer and volunteer firefighter, Mitch Garner, blaming himself for the tragic outcome. He loses all hope of forgiving himself. His only hope for redemption is to leave Jennie, the girl he’s loved since high school, and journey from Wisconsin’s lush farmland to the decaying inner city of Milwaukee to prove himself as a professional firefighter.

Mitch is assigned to the busiest firehouse in the heart of one of the most blighted areas of Milwaukee, the Core, where he’s viciously hazed by senior firefighters. He struggles to hold it together at horrific scenes of violence and can’t do anything right at fires. Within weeks, he’s ready to give up and quit. His salvation comes in the form of a brash adolescent girl, Jasmine Richardson. Mitch is assigned to tutor her little sister through a department mentoring program. Despite Jasmine’s contempt toward Mitch, her courage and devotion to her little sister inspire Mitch to stay and dedicate himself to helping her and the neighboring children overcome the hopelessness of growing up in crushing poverty.

Trouble on the farm has Mitch torn between returning home to Jennie and staying in Milwaukee where he’ll be forced to risk his life to protect Jasmine from the leader of the One-Niner street gang.

My review:

Renz has created a wonderful story of finding and following the heart. Mitch is a young man of great passion who has difficulty deciding how and where to spend that passion. His girlfriend Jennie is a home girl and devastated when Mitch simply can’t stop blaming himself for a terrible accident. Mitch’s need to heal takes him away from home for the first time in order to grow and learn and experience a different way of living than his small-town and in some ways, small-minded, rural upbringing. He finds all of that in fire-fighting training in the heart of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, still the most segregated community in the States. When his brother and father need him, though, he has many choices to make; ultimately, about who needs him, and who he needs, the most. Saving the world often starts in one’s own backyard.

Told from several perspectives, but mostly Mitch’s, Renz uses his career in firefighting to tell an honest and real story of what it’s like to be a professional firefighter in contemporary urban settings.

About the Author:

Fire Captain Gregory Lee Renz was involved in a dramatic rescue of two little boys from their burning basement bedroom. He received a series of awards for this rescue including induction into the Wisconsin Fire and Police Hall of Fame in 2006. When he was asked to share the dramatic rescue at several awards banquets, he was moved by the emotional responses he received and was struck by the power of his storytelling. After serving the citizens of Milwaukee for twenty-eight years as a firefighter, Gregory Lee Renz retired to Lake Mills, Wisconsin with his wife, Paula. After numerous creative writing courses through the University of Wisconsin and countless workshops, conferences, and revisions, he finally typed The End to Beneath the Flames.