Indeholder kapitlerne "1. Ulysses", "2. Homer", "3. Telegrafkontoret", "4. Hele verden vil misunde mig", "5. Gå du din vej, så går jeg min", "6. En sang for Mr. Grogan", "7. Hvis der kommer et budskab", "8. Vær hos os ved vort bord, oh Herre", "9. Kaniner rundt omkring her, hvor de så end er", "10. Oldtidskundskab", "11. En tale om den menneskelige næse", "12. 220 meter forhindringsløbet", "13. Fælden, for Guds skyld, fælden", "14. Diana", "15. Pigen på hjørnet", "16. Jeg skal bringe din hjem igen", "17. Tre soldater", "18. Mr. Grogan om krigen", "19. Til moder, med hilsen", "20. Det er værst for jer, ikke for mig", "21. En bedre verden, et bedre folk", "22. Lad lyset skinne", "23. Død, tag ikke til Ithaca", "24. Abrikostræet", "25. Vær lykkelig! Vær lykkelig!", "26. Der vil altid være smerte i tingene", "27. Alle de vidunderlige fejltagelser", "28. På folkebiblioteket", "29. I den kvindelige foredragsforening", "30. Bethel", "31. Mr. Mechano", "32. Støttet til det evigt blanke sværd", "33. Et brev fra Marcus til hans bror Homer", "34. Her er et kys", "35. Løvens latter", "36. Træerne og vinen", "37. Ithaca, mit Ithaca!", "38. Kærlighed er udødelig, had dør hvert øjeblik", "39. Enden og begyndelsen".

USA, Californien, Ithaca, 1940'erne
En familie, hvor tre brødre, Ulysses, Homer og Marcus Macauley, er vokset op sammen. De bor ved deres mor, der er enke og anden verdenskrig har gjort at Marcus er indkaldt til krigstjeneste. ???
??? ( )

Beautiful. Heartwarming without being saccharine. A true classic. ( )

Homer Macauley is a 14-year-old boy growing up fatherless in the San Joaquin Valley of California during World War II. His oldest brother, Marcus, is off fighting the war, and Homer feels he needs to be the man of the family. To make money, he takes an evening job as a telegraph boy, meaning sometimes he has to deliver the news to a family that a son has died in the War. Yet Homer keeps up his normal life, going to school, to church, and to the movies. He is encouraged by his home environment and his loving family, including a very young brother and a mother who plays the harp. His roots and an almost instinctive sense of right and wrong keep him honest and hopeful

Boy in small town during WW2. Originally written in 1943. ( )

This was Saroyan's own novelisation of a screenplay he'd written for MGM, which perhaps accounts for its almost unbearably decent, optimistic, American-Dream-celebrating tone.

It's 1943, and the small town of Ithaca in California's San Joaquin Valley is a place where the locals are happy to lecture you on profound truths of human nature at a moment's notice at any time of day or night, whilst ev'ry prospect pleases and only sports teachers are vile. The young men are away fighting a distant and seemingly endless war (it's not called Ithaca by accident, evidently), and child-labour is a lesser evil than the unspeakable thought that women and girls might be forced to go out to work, so fourteen-year-old Homer (!) is working nights delivering telegrams whilst his even younger friend August sells newspapers on street corners. Long live the free market!

There are a lot of lovely little scenes in this book — the raid on the unripe apricot tree, the scene where Homer's little brother Ulysses (!!) gets caught in a patent trap and no-one knows how to release him, and best of all Homer's impromptu lecture on noses in Ancient History. But it's not really enough to defeat the unrelenting niceness and the dead hand of narrative inevitability: we know from the start that there's only one way a story about a telegram boy whose brother is away in the war can end. ( )