The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked

A “Best Book of the Year” finalist of the Great Lakes Booksellers Association, here is a laugh-out-loud retelling of an American childhood.Through the telling of his own madcap childhood, David Benjamin pays homage to the exuberance of countless young boys growing up in Middle America in the 1950s. Whether he’s stalking frogs through the bogs of Tomah, Wisconsin, playing four-kid baseball with his bothersome little brother and two favorite cousins, or sneaking into the theater to watch Saturday-afternoon Westerns, Benjamin is the kind of little kid who would have fallen in eagerly with the redoubtable Tom Sawyer.Traversing the nooks and crannies of kidhood, from ballfields to swimming holes, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked captures a time and a place in twentieth-century American life and celebrates the adventures and wanderlust that once made childhood such an exhilarating enterprise.