Book Blurb:
Raised in a small rural setting with a family full of love, humor and challenges, Charles C. Finney, Jr. began work at an early age (7). Mowing neighbor’s yards and selling Christmas Cards. He later help his family by helping Grandpa and Uncle on their farm. Then at age 12-13, he along with his two first cousins helped his uncle with the first garbage pickup service in his small town.
He played sports and was an avid learner in science. At age 13-14, he obtained his Amateur Radio License and built his own radio. He helped family and friends in TV repair. He went on to place 3rd in a science fair at what is now Univ of Chattanooga. He completed high school and a 2-year technical school in the same year. He worked his way beyond high school at a funeral home, an ice cream dairy plant, a plastic injection molding plant, and at a factory making equine supplies.
Charles began work at Tennessee Valley Authority where he progressed from an clerical position to a manager in less than five years. He was the manager of a technical writing section responsible for the description of all TVA’s 500,000 items of inventory. He help created training manuals to aid in product description writings. He facilitated in Procurement writing sessions. He left there due to a corporate management downsizing and began work as a salesperson in retail, auto, insurance and financial planning.
He was offered a position as a Fleet Data Analyst with the City of Chattanooga Police Dept. He later was responsible for the same work but for the entire City Fleet. During this time he was responsible for creating and writing reports on both financial and technical nature. He retired in 2016 After his retirement, he began to reflect on his collection of memories and experiences.
Charles’ writings are a remembrance of his love for family, farm life and his up bringing in church. His love of Jesus intertwined with country humor to be a blessing to all.
I received this book from the author for free. All comments and opinions are entirely my own and this review is voluntary.
Lexi’s Review:
In Grandpa- Good News from the Good Feel Cornfield, Mr. Finney shares some memories of his grandfather, along with his own spiritual commentary.
I would’ve enjoyed the homespun wisdom of this book more if it wasn’t for the egregious capitalization, punctuation, and spelling errors, as well as incomplete sentences, sentence fragments, mixed metaphors, and improperly attributed quotes.
In addition to the formatting issues, the author’s thought processes are not always clear. For example, he compares rows of corn to isolated people to Haggai 1:5, “Consider your ways” (Finney 10-11). I was already struggling to understand the connection between rows of corn and isolated people, and when he threw in the Scripture reference, I was completely lost. Throughout the rest of the book, there are also places where the author copies and pastes Scripture passages without explanation or commentary (13, 23-25). Another element that confused me about this book is that there is no clear distinction between the author’s own thoughts and the thoughts of the grandfather character. The author writes, “Grandpa was not what you might call a religious man” (Finney 14). This is extremely conflicting after the overtly religious content of the previous pages.
One of my favorite sections of this book is “Grand Pa and the Chicken Nest” (Finney 16).The author writes,
“We gather our favorite things around us to create a safe dwelling place providing us warmth, comfort, security, beauty, and peace” (17).
He goes on to talk about how the local church builds a nest in which “people show love one to another” (19). I thought that image was really beautiful.
Contrarily, one of the worst parts of the book, in my opinion, is when the author calls human thieves “two-legged rats” and uses a metaphor about rats to explain his theories on racism (Finney 31-33). I understand that a farmer would want to protect his possessions from human thieves, but calling them two-legged rats is going too far, in my opinion.
Overall, I would give this book three stars. The wisdom that the author inherited from his grandfather is really precious and I would have loved to read about his memories of his grandfather without spiritual commentary. But the book truly needed a professional editor to be enjoyed fully.
Rated:
