A. J. Bolinger's memoir of growing up in Kansas is fascinating reading. He had the knack of being in the right place at the right time and can tell us a great deal about life in Kansas towns, both small and large, many years ago. His description of joining Carrie Nation in smashing saloons in Topeka is priceless. Bolinger’s work does a very good job of explaining, without even trying, that his was a different time and place." - Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, author of <i>The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America since 1865</i><br /><br />"A. J. Bolinger transports us back to the American Midwest when the nineteenth century was drawing to a close and possibilities seemed endless for those seeking a better tomorrow. Frontier settlements were growing into cities, new states were forming, industries were developing, and pioneer heroes of the Old West were passing their torches to a new generation. Editors Jeffrey Barker and Melissa Walker skillfully set the stage for Bolinger’s captivating memoir, adding valuable historical context to the narrative." - Lana Wirt Myers, editor of <i>The Diaries of Reuben Smith, Kansas Settler and Civil War Soldier</i>, and author of <i>Prairie Rhythms: The Life and Poetry of May Williams Ward</i><br /><br />"Arthur Joel Bolinger’s story of his Kansas boyhood is not your typical grandfather’s (or great-grandfather’s) frontier memoir. In the first place, it goes well beyond his late nineteenth-century boyhood in several Flint Hills locations, where his father tried farming and storekeeping; to his educational experiences in Topeka with frequent visits to Kansas City; to his early adulthood sojourn to Oklahoma, where circumstances found Bolinger ‘a died in the wool, born and reared Republican,’ editing a ‘rip-roaring’ Democratic newspaper. In the second place, as the editors point out in their fine contextual introductory essay, the memoir often eloquently offers ‘delightful and revealing insights’ into the turn-of-the-century life of a middle American of modest upbringing—as Bolinger opined, his are mostly ‘simple tales,’ seemingly ‘trivial and unimportant. Trivial they are of course, but unimportant, no. All our lives are a woven pattern of trivial things.’" - Virgil W. Dean, editor of <i>John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History</i><br /><br />"A delightful romp through the early twentieth century, <i>Kansas Boy</i> exhibits Bolinger’s sharp eye, which is immediate and fresh—a backstage glimpse of both daily life and national events faithfully rendered by a true Kansas boy." - Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, former executive director, Chapman Center for Rural Studies, Kansas State University, and author of <i>Red Earth: Race and Agriculture in Oklahoma Territory</i> and <i>Sauble: Stories from the Flint Hills</i>