THIS STUBBORN SOIL A Frontier Boyhood <i> by William Owens (Vintage: $8.95)</i>

Gertrude Stein believed that the 20th Century began in America in the 1880s; in this memoir, William Owens demonstrates that the 19th Century lingered well into the 1920s in rural Texas. His childhood differed only in minor details from the life of an antebellum pioneer’s son. In deceptively plain sentences, he crafts honest but loving portraits of his mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, three women condemned by widowhood to dire poverty. Unlike his brothers, Owens refused to accept the life of a dirt-poor farmer and fought to obtain the education he so ardently desired. His straightforward descriptions of hardship, loneliness, toil and despair provide a welcome balance to Hollywood’s romanticized vision of frontier life: Pin Hook, Tex., was a long way from “The Little House on the Prairie.”