This Is Only a Test [Paperback]

On April 27, 2011, just days after learning of their pregnancy, B. J. Hollars, his wife, and their future son endured the onslaught of an EF-4 tornado. There, while huddled in a bathtub in their Alabama home, mortality flashed before their eyes. With the last of his computer battery, Hollars began recounting the experience, and would continue to do so in the following years, writing his way out of one disaster only to find himself caught up in another. Tornadoes, drownings, and nuclear catastrophes force him to acknowledge the inexplicable, while he attempts to overcome his greatest fearthe impossibility of protecting his newborn son from the worlds cruelties. Hollars creates a constellation of grief, tapping into the rarely acknowledged intersection between fatherhood and fear, sacrifice and safety, and the humbling effect of losing control of our lives.

This Is Only a Test exposes our fearsreal and fake, invented and imbeddedof disasters. Through Hollarss own experiences, research, and rememberings, he examines how our fears are often unfounded or inflated, even created. B. J. Hollars is in a field all of his own.Through spare, haunting, and heart-wrenching prose, Hollars deftly guides the reader from the tornado-torn streets of Tuscaloosa to the lakes and rivers of Wisconsin, from his backyard to nuclear Japan, and ultimately into those tiny intimate moments of fear that shape a new fathers consciousness. Combining a novelists ear for dialogue and drama with a poets eye for detail, Hollars's essays delve into the hard spaces, mapping out a place for hope, or at least some small moments of happiness.This Is Only a Test is an immediate read.?I dont only mean you should read it immediately, though I do mean that deeply. I mean the act of reading this wonderful new collection is close, personal and compelling. The book is nearly alive in your hands as each story, and then each implication, each idea unfolds. In one section, a tornado falls from the skyl“M