Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: Rediscovering Life in an American Village | 
 enlarge | Author: Barbara Holland
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $12.00
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Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 1112634
Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.4
ISBN: 0156006650
Dewey Decimal Number: 975.528
EAN: 9780156006651
ASIN: 0156006650
Publication Date: June 2, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Product Description
When Barbara Holland inherited her mother's small cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, she quit her job in advertising and moved from Philadelphia to her new home high on a mountain, with only her cat for company. In Bingo Night at the Fire Hall, Holland recounts her adventures and misadventures adjusting to life in a rural community, as her small town adjusts to the inevitable encroachment of suburbia. Whether writing obituaries for the local paper or learning how to handle a chainsaw, Holland shares the triumphs and travails of being a newcomer to an old land with a rich history, a beautiful place sadly losing ground to subdivisions and four-lane highways. Filled with wonderful anecdotes, humor, and insight, Bingo Night at the Fire Hall is a fascinating portrait of a paradisical yet disappearing world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Excellent chat with a dear friend November 30, 2008
Matthew Jackson (Colorado, USA)
I picked up this book while in Iraq and discovered an amazing author with a gift for showing you the nuances of country side living in America. This book should be on the college reading list of any classes about contemporary living in America. A fun, humorous at times, educational, and entertaining look at life in the country. highly recommended.
 Charming author in a strange new world October 12, 2007
Debra Hamel (TwitterLit.com)
When she was in her early 60's author Barbara Holland moved from Philadelphia to Loudon County in Northern Virginia, to a small house in the Blue Ridge Mountains some 60 miles outside of Washington D.C. It might as well have been a different planet. In Bingo Night at the Fire Hall Holland describes the world she came almost by accident to inhabit, a place somehow "unreachably far beyond the headlines and the evening news." Her house on the mountain overlooks a fertile valley in which the same families have farmed for generations. As she describes it, the people there live (or lived, at least, in the 1990s, when she was writing this book) in a sort of time capsule, a Mayberry-like idyll of 4-H clubs and church picnics. It's a place where nobody locks their doors (locking them would seem unneighborly), where people are defined not by their resumes but by their family ties.
Holland approaches her subject from a number of different angles, with chapters on the area's extensive role in the Civil War, for example, and on the weather and wildlife:
"I was pleased and excited to have a bear, until I followed the tracks to the lower porch and considered the remains of the trash bags. Among the strewn litter of crushed cans and coffee grounds the bear, like a psychotic burglar, had defecated copiously."
But what makes the book stand out is her description of the ethos of this place, where families' lives are intertwined over generations and where one is surrounded by one's family:
"On any given day a person in the supermarket could come across his or her entire extended family, one by one, aisle by aisle, pausing to exchange fragments of news among the canned goods. This would horrify city folk, whose relatives tend to get on their nerves, but we're a low-strung lot around here and our satisfaction with our birthplace spreads to include our kin -- or perhaps we consider them one and the same."
It would horrify me, certainly. But Holland writes about this way of life so well that one not only understands it, one almost pines for it:
"Relatives are more useful here than in the city or suburb. They have tools you can borrow. They're someone to call, in a taxiless world, when you need a ride. Someone to leave the kids with or go hunting with; someone to help get your firewood in or your boat painted. Someone to carry your coffin. From cradle to grave, my neighbors here swing in a hammock of family ties and nobody leaves except for the churchyard. Even the few who fled to Florida get carried home in the end."
The book makes clear how much modern lifestyles differ from the way of life that was natural to so many generations before us: small communities of neighbors living off the land, interdependent, clustered around a handful of public buildings--the bank and post office and general store. Nowadays, Holland writes, people don't need towns. They need highways between their work places and their living spaces, with places to shop in between.
At the same time that Holland is celebrating life in her valley, however, she is also recording its demise. The land that fed armies on both sides during the Civil War is yielding--increasingly, inexorably--to strip malls and housing projects. The fertility of the soil doesn't matter if you're only interested in paving it over. One can see through Holland's eyes how this influx of rootless Others is an affront to the land.
Holland, of course, is herself an immigrant, but unlike the housing developers who are carving the valley into subdivisions, she did not efface her surroundings; she adapted to them. Being an outsider also made her a keen observer of the world around her, which we can only be thankful for. I enjoyed Holland's book enormously. It is charmingly written and wise. I'll be seeking out more from her.
-- Debra Hamel
Ruminations from the rural/suburban interface May 29, 2007
Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
During the 1700s and 1800s, as the burgeoning population of the White Man, backed by his relatively sophisticated farming methods and industrial capacity, slowly encroached upon and suffocated the Native American cultures, there must have been those writers who bemoaned the passing of the Noble Savage and his way of life. Here, in BINGO NIGHT AT THE FIRE HALL, Barbara Holland, at the interface of vanishing rural, small-farm America and metastasizing, mall-happy suburbia, performs the same function.
The place is northern Virginia, less than an hour's drive west of Dulles International. Barbara places herself in a mountain cabin inherited from her mother near the village of Pikestown, a short distance from North Hill, at a gap in the Appalachians. After determined inspection of a Rand McNally, I can state with some degree of certainty that these are fictional place names. I suspect her point of view to emanate from somewhere in the Front Royal-Chester Gap-Sperryville arc. The time is the mid-1990s, and Holland herself is perhaps in her 60s.
Those readers who enjoyed Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences and Wasn't the Grass Greener?: Thirty-three Reasons Why Life Isn't as Good as It Used to Be are acquainted with the author's style, which is similar to that of the curmudgeonly Andy Rooney, but without the mean streak. But while the other two volumes deal with specifics, BINGO NIGHT AT THE FIRE HALL concerns itself with a way of life, a more nebulous concept, that otherwise gets lost in the mundane details of everyday living. This life, represented by family farms, local general stores, town meetings, bingo nights, a deeply felt Civil War heritage, local fund-raisers, school Christmas pageants, clean-cut and drug-free adolescents, and an environment where everyone knows everybody else, is giving way to the impersonal, stressed-out, multicultural, politically correct, acquisitive, self-centered and insidiously spreading suburbia created by the maturing post-war Baby Boomers and their spawn. And Barbara, a former big city dweller herself, observes this transition creeping over the ridgeline into her own back yard, and hints at a loss of deeper, traditional values.
This book is unlikely to appeal to the young or middle aged, but to those older who are simply getting old and marginalized. This fact doesn't invalidate Barbara's observations, but rather makes them irrelevant to the newest generations, who will, in time, have their own turn at disenchantment.
 Great Writing Ability, However This Holland Book Has Some Problems July 11, 2006
Avid Reader (Florida)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
After reading Barbara Holland's "When All the World Was Young", which I absolutely adored, I immediately had to order another of her books. I must say I was not nearly as enamored of this story. I will say I still think she is a gifted writer. Many of her descriptions are a joy to read. However, I had a couple of problems with this story. First, there actually is little story here. In a few places, the long description of the dedication of the new post office comes to mind, it became so mind-numbingly boring that I skipped ahead a few pages. Second, I became a little confused and frankly less than sympathtic to the main character, Barbara. If she so hates the winters in the mountain, why does she stay there? It's obvious she is miserable much of the year. Also, why live in a rural area where "everyone knows you business" and privacy is, in fact, harder to come by than in the big city, if you are a loner at heart (which she obviously is.) Where are her children? Grown now, but why does she never see them, so it seems, and practically never even mentions them. Finally, I found her criticism of the families in the new subdivisions to be a bit cruel. When I read "When All the World Was Young", I found it to be a delightful journey back to the 1950's, the same time I grew up. But in reading "Bingo Night", which takes place in contemporary times, I began to feel that Ms Holland, in fact, would be happier living in the past. As people grow older, some of us adapt to change better than others. Ms Holland's obvious discontent with modern life in American today suggests that she does not adapt well to change. I so loved the other book! I wish she would give fiction a try, she is such an amazing writer, but I'll not read any more of her nonfiction stories.
A continuous page turning story April 25, 2004
Shannon (Rhode Island)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am not much of a reader. As usual I was fumbling through the book store on one of those boring family vacations and fell into this book. I could not seem to put it down. This book was very well written and I plan to read all of Barbara Hollands books she is a very creative writer and I would recommend any of her books ( even though I have only read this one ) to anyone.
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