Between Them: Remembering My Parents

"Nobody gives “ordinary” human beings their due with the grace and precision that Richard Ford does. His slim new memoir about his parents is so gently spellbinding that I’ve already read it twice. Ford’s father, Parker, was a traveling bleach salesman in places like Mobile, Ala., and Little Rock, Ark., during the 1930s and early ‘40s. Ford’s mother, Edna, (and later young Richard) would often go along for the ride, stopping at the grocery stores that dotted his father’s route and staying at the small hotels and rooming houses that were the homes-away-from-home to traveling salesmen. Part of the bonus of this little book is that it sits readers down in the company car and takes us on an unsentimental but enchanted journey through the long-ago landscape of the American South."