Population: 485 (P.S.),   ISBN:9780061363504

Customer Rating: 

Michael Perry's "Population 485" is a wonderful reminisce in the life of a volunteer firefighter and EMT in a small rural Wisconsin town.

The stories are many while performing these vital duties and responsibilities. From the people Perry meets and interfaces with, to the events he witnesses, it's as good as it gets from an insider's viewpoint. Perceptive and insightful.

Several emotions surface while reading the book. Perry is humorous, heartfelt, genuine and pensive. His ponderings on place and space in time reach deep into the realms of being.

Hearing these stories from Perry's spin of writing and viewpoint was a pleasure.

Customer Rating: 

Michael Perry is quite clearly a writer - a very good one and well traveled. In what must rank as a rather peculiar career decision, Perry goes home to the small northwestern Wisconsin town in which he was raised to write, live, and work as a volunteer firefighter. Population 485 is a collection of essays more or less responding to these experiences. There is no clear narrative thread and the themes of the essays vary widely. Each, however, explains in a small way why the small town lifestyle is appealing to many and in a large way the debt we owe as a society to our emergency personnel. He covers everything from the initial panic of receiving a call to the grim decision to cease lifesaving efforts, and everything from the disappearance of small town main streets to the camaraderie of the volunteer firefighter picnic - deftly mixing deep thinking with the lowest of brows.

Too often, in my opinion, books that dwell on small towns are either bitter or saccharine - rarely hitting quite the right spot. Michael Perry clearly tends toward the sweet end of the spectrum, focusing on the compassionate characters of his small town, often at their best. He does not, however, write a caricature. Coming from a small town, though my memories are not so halcyonic, I recognize Perry's characters, their desire to do right and their concern for their neighbor. And I recognize the worrisome signs of decay - the indications that our small towns are not long for the world, at least in their current form. Perry has done more good deeds than I can count in his role as an emergency responder, and has done another with his book. Population 485 is fine writing about regular good guys in a place that's fading. Population 485 won't change anyone's life, but it's definitely worth the few hours it takes to read.

Customer Rating: 

It might be best to read Perry's Wisconsin books in the order in which he wrote them. This was the first. I read TRUCK: A LOVE STORY first. POPULATION: 485 is wonderfully written and engaging, but has darker moments due to the passages about Perry's volunteer fire department calls. TRUCK is softer and funnier although there are plenty of funny moments in this book, too. I laughed out loud at the scene in which he is using a sewer snake for the first time!

Perry's Wisconsin books are about everyday life, but he never "dumbs down" the vocabulary. He has a musical command of the English language and gives descriptions that make me wish I could see things like he does.

Humor is awfully hard to write. Michael Perry does it very well while simultaneously telling good stories.

Customer Rating: 

Michael Perry is a really good writer. He knows how to make you laugh and he knows how to make you cry, and both skills are on display in this well received look into small town America. Perry is a firefighter/first responder/EMT who is on call twenty four hours a day. You get to meet some of his buddies in the fire department, and you will go with as he tends to the needs of hurting people. Sometimes, the people he tries to save make it, sometimes they don't. Through it all, he learns about community, love, life, death, and the search for meaning and significance. The story is bookended by two terrible car accidents, each one ending with the death of a young woman in her early twenties.

I minister in a Wisconsin town even smaller than New Auburn, so I readily connected with the stories and with the people. Some stories will make you laugh (The one about the cross eyed man getting his eyes fixed by having skin from his scrotum applied to his eye was classic. He was cockeyed ever since :)

Some stories will gross you out (the fat woman who pukes all over, on the toilet, in the ambulance and in the hospital). But every story is real and reflects the lives of real people. It's fun read and you will feel like you are a part of the New Auburn community.

Customer Rating: 

Michael Perry has a great way of explaining and writing the simple things. When I read his books it feels like we are sitting around the kitchen table listening to the day's events. It just happens that Perry is better at getting those stories across than most of us. There were times in this book that I felt he had expanded his story a little far to places I didn't need to go to understand his meaning, but I knew right around the corner there would be something that would have my full attention. I was surprised by the sad ending and loved it.