Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore

This book is at once an engrossing story of murder in a small American town and a profound meditation on the meaning of childhood in modern America. Ron Powers, co-author of Flags of Our Fathers, returns to Hannibal, Missouri--the boyhood home of Mark Twain, and also where Powers grew up--after learning about two local teenage killers. The very notion of it shook him: "In addition to their human victims, small-town killings assault ... the myth of the hearth, the safe inner circle that protects a loving enclave against the cruelties of a barbarous world." He goes on to describe "a world of absent or dimly connected adults" and how adolescents fall into the grip of a deep meaninglessness and whose "daily movements might easily begin with a search for a better brand of cigarette and end with a shotgun murder." Most of Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore is a tale of two true crimes, though it's also punctuated by autobiography and full of Twain references. Hard to put down because the writing is so good, the book is hard to forget because its message is so troubling. --John Miller