How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction Ser.) Hardcover – July 1, 1992
by Phyllis Barber
 
The author recounts her childhood and youth as a Mormon in Las Vegas, when she studied the piano, joined a high school dance group, and looked for a way of life outside her religion and the garish world of the casinos
 
Amazon.com Review
A beautifully written memoir of a Mormon girl growing up with a hunger for high-culture within the confines of Las Vegas, the indisputable bathysmal depths of American low-culture. Winner of the Associated Writing Program Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and deservedly compared by other critics to Annie Dillard's exquisitely crafted An American Childhood, one of my very favorite autobiographies.
From Publishers Weekly
In this account of her Mormon childhood in Nevada in the 1940s and early '50s, Barber notes that at age 12 she began "to feel rumblings inside that I might exist as a separate entity from my family." That premonition was gradually realized after her family moved from the sheltered government-town ambiance of Boulder City, where her father was a Hoover Dam employee and a Mormon official, to "another world called Las Vegas." A piano prodigy, Barber relished preparing for her featured roles in Mormon socials, but it was during her high school years in Las Vegas that she explored a larger, less inhibited world. Barber recounts how she became a member of the Las Vegas Rhythmettes, and her disappointing meeting with visiting maestro Leonard Bernstein, with self-deprecating humor and a youthful brio in a memoir that captures a vivacious girl's efforts to express herself within contradictory milieux. Barber, a professional pianist, teaches in Vermont College's graduate writing program.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, Barber's book describes growing up in Nevada in the 1950s. The young Phyllis struggles with her strong Mormon faith, the expectations of her friends at Las Vegas High School, and her artistic urges, which she expresses through piano playing and dancing. Her introspective asides show us how these disparate forces came together. Re-creating experiences from performing in a church talent show to watching a nuclear bomb test to modeling in a Las Vegas casino, Barber evokes a uniquely Western adolescence. Recom mended.
- Gwen Gregory, U.S. Courts Lib., Phoenix
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Barber (The School of Love, 1990) tells of her childhood and early adolescence in Nevada, and of her yearnings for some indefinable circumstance that would allow her to transcend tawdry Las Vegas and the strict dictates of her Mormon religion. The author writes of a family car-trip into the desert to witness an atomic-bomb test; of pilgrimages to the man-made marvel of the Hoover Dam; and of a visit by Hawaiians who performed a wild, semiclad show at the local high school and who stayed at Barber's house, marking her first contact with the wonders of the world outside Nevada. The discovery of her own musical talents seemed to Barber to open up a path to greater things: She studied piano, was praised by family and friends, and got a job playing for a ballet studio. But she avoided lessons with a new teacher who threatened to demand more of her than the flashy popular favorites that impressed everyone else. High school brought the chance to try out for the Rhythmettes, a kick-line/cheerleading squad; channeling all of her ambition and longing into this quest, Barber succeeded in making the team. Among the Rhythmettes' duties was greeting visiting celebrities at the airport--and Barber took it personally when Leonard Bernstein ignored her. Then sex reared its head, causing painful conflict with the principles of purity upheld by her religion. Barber is at her best when she is most concrete, contrasting the garish Sodom of Las Vegas with the simple-living, high-minded ways of her Mormon family and with the forbidding beauty of the desert. When she tries to home-in on peak moments of emotion and epiphany, though, her writing tends to go purple and hazy. Overall, an engaging coming-of-age memoir by a writer of charm and spunk. (Eight illustrations--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
 
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