First Job: A Memoir Of Growing Up At Work

by Rinker Buck

Ask a person about his or her first job out of college, and you invariably open a floodgate of emotions, vivid anecdotes, and poignant reminiscences of an especially anxious, formative period of life. For many of us, the events of those first years of true adulthood remain permanently etched in our psyches, and the bonds we formed - with co-workers, friends, and lovers - carry an emotional power undimmed by the passage of time.
Ask Rinker Buck about his first job, and you get this enchanting and engaging book, one that not only captures the experience of being a "twenty-two-year-old with the maxed-out brain," but also lyrically evokes a special time and place - the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts in the early 1970s. Buck was intense and passionate about his experiences - determined to find his voice as a writer - and every new moment felt like a world opening wide. First Job is, on its most basic level, the story of Buck's years as a cub reporter at The Berkshire Eagle, a great country newspaper in its glory years, when it won a Pulitzer Prize and served as the launching pad for many journalists' careers. But on a deeper level, it is a story that serves as a paradigm for everyone's first job. Buck's tale is replete with mentors who guided him through a raw and anxious time, lovers who exposed him to new levels of intimacy; and adventures that could only have happened to a young man who didn't know any better - including the way he snared an exclusive interview with John Wayne by bringing along a pretty girl who so charmed the Duke that he gave Buck a wonderfully frank and cranky story to write.
From Buck's impromptu job interview with the Eagle's venerable and eccentric publisher, Pete Miller - who quizzed him on Civil War history - to his picaresque adventures on the front lines of the sexual revolution, to his exhilarating hikes along the purple-black Berkshire peaks with Roger Linscott (the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning editorialist), he reconstructs a magical time in his life, a time when nothing seemed impossible or out of reach.

Genres: Memoir

416 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2002

About the author

Rinker Buck began his career in journalism at the Berkshire Eagle and was a longtime staff writer for the Hartford Courant. He has written for Vanity Fair, New York, Life, and many other publications, and his stories have won the Eugene S. Pulliam National Journalism Writing Award and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. He is the author of The Oregon Trail as well as the acclaimed memoirs Flight of Passage and First Job. He lives in northwest Connecticut.

Follow him at Facebook.com/RinkerBuck.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author has a massive ego, his depictions of love scenes are horribly written, and I cringed every time he used the phrases "smirky-smile," "sorority of women," and "book-turd" -- which was way too often. Yet despite these fallacies, it was an entertaining bio.

[Sharon Leaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story; great writing. Inspiring for those struggling writers out there who choose not to give up.