Rerun
Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the
environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the
entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a
family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in
the television. Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard’s past
selves from the late ‘70s and early '80s, Rerun Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving
father, her women’s libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding
teenage brother. Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular
culture portrays the rural American past, it perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of
nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which
manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly
Hillbillies.