BACKLIST

REVIEW BY  Joanne Forman

(While we review older books here, we’re stretching it this time to
include one that’s barely a year old. But it’s so outstanding, it deserves
notice.)

COURAGE GROWS STRONG AT THE WOUND*
by Robert Koehler

Amidst the yelling and screaming, the screaming and squawking and
squealing, the noxious clouds of pontifical hot air, it’s always balm
to come across a writer who is not only sane and modest, but
possessed of a sense of humor.

Such a one is Chicagoan Robert Koehler, who has–to our benefit–tied
himself to the wheel of a weekly newspaper column for over ten years.
Some of these he’s now collected in an absorbing and graceful book,
COURAGE GROWS STRONG AT THE WOUND.

The wound was the loss of his wife to cancer. He quickly discovered,
“I still had a life: a child, the job, the same bills to pay.” And
the courage comes, one speculates, from the necessity to get out of
bed in the morning, to rear a child, to pay the bills, to just keep
on keeping on.

One could quote endlessly from the wide range of this keen,
omnivorous writer, but here’s just one. The staunch Chicagoan has
visited New Mexico: “As a pinched-horizon Midwesterner, I couldn’t
get over the size of the sky..a state enormously easy to love at
first sight…”

Try COURAGE GROWS STRONG AT THE WOUND. You’ll like it.

*Xenos Press, 6166 N. Sheridan, 18C, Chicago IL 60660