Yonder Life on the Far Side of Change [Paperback]

JIM W. CORDER (1929–1998) was an English professor at Texas Christian University. He is the author of numerous books includingHunting Lieutenant Chadbourne (Georgia),Chronicle of a Small Town, and Lost in West Texas. Texas Christian University created the Corder Fellowship in his honor.Merging cultural commentary and intense introspection, Yonder is a remarkable meditation on change, memory, nostalgia, and the modern condition. A contrapuntal mix of contemporary history and the events of the author’s personal life, Yonder portrays and ponders a world delivered from the pieties and hierarchies of the past yet incapacitated by the dizzying excess of new connotations and perspectives, choices and possibilities. Yonder is about Corder’s struggle for a footing against nostalgia’s pull. In a kind of nonlinear, semi random sorting process reflected in the book’s structure, Corder turns inward to refocus hazy memories and estimate and shoulder his responsibilities for the turns his life has taken. These events are juxtaposed against the momentous changes of his generation, drawing universal truths from the offhand and obscure, discerning pitch and tone in the white noise.

Yonder moves Corder’s philosophical journey from the past to the present and contemplates the role of personal and historical change in the shaping of the present. . . . It is readable, and as entertaining as a quiet front porch conversation on a midsummer’s evening.

Corder is a kind of down-home Kafka whose fingers skim the air in hopes of netting some pollen from a phantasmal twentieth century life.

Don’t read Yonder in a hurry. Savor its cadences, its rich rhetorical flourishes, and embrace the deep swells of hurt that release the sweet, thankful awareneslC´