This is a narrative describing the most vivid impressions of the first fourteen years of James Kostelniuk's life as he grew up on a Manitoba grain farm north of Selkirk. It's not history, but a book of collective memories of the 1940s and 50s based on life as he and others remember it. There is a dramatic distance between the author's world as a child and the world of children today. Kostelniuk - and millions like him - were not so nature deprived. He wandered the open fields along a creek bank, free to begin his journey, to investigate and learn, a child of nature. The 1950s was a decade rife with conflict. Freedom was overshadowed by two world wars and marred by the Cold War, which spread propaganda and fear across the globe like fallout from the hydrogen bomb. The story is an honest one - it's not always full of sunshine and bright hope. Reading, one discovers themes of adultery, cruelty (of man and nature) and hardship. There's a darkness to the prairie sky. This is the second work of narrative memoir for James Kostelniuk, the author of Wolves Among Sheep: The True Story of Murder in a Jehovah's Witness Community. A Winnipeg Transit bus driver for 21 years, he is now retired, living outside of Winnipeg with his wife, Marge.
