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From a book review I wrote for the Charlotte Observer: Part literary memoir, part coming-of-age through landscape metaphor, Caldwell tells the story of her youth in the Texas panhandle and then beyond, complete with smoking, skipping journalism, writing bad poetry, dropping out of school, getting arrested, protesting war, and circling back around to the life she seemed destined for as a child when she retreated into books. A mild, bookish child, she grew into the unlikely, a Vietnam War protestor opposite her World War II veteran father, with her recollections almost always referencing the books that fed her soul through each rebellion, awakening her evolution. Though Caldwell fails to heed the off-repeated writing instructor adage: “show, don’t tell,” her lyrical story still compels the reader forward with the insight she delivers in measured, masterful prose. “Standing there in the space of so much space and beauty, I had the split-second insight that everything might be all right—that you could trust people to be kind, that you could outlast your own jumpy nerves, that fear could well give way to winged flight,” Caldwell writes of standing at the top of a grain elevator looking at the expanse of Texas before her. Caldwell’s life spent as an insatiable reader, her attraction to place and landscape, the gentle yet truthful way she recalls her culture and history, and her career spent as a keen-eyed book critic make “A Strong West Wind” a memoir that illuminates more than just the writer’s life. It propels the reader onto a similar journey, considering the possibilities and limits in her own landscape.