According to Harry: My 22 Proofs That God Exists - Hardcover

Kirkus Review

A debut autobiography focuses on an ordinary guy.

The title of Craddock’s memoir is a bit tricky. Fans of theological debates won’t find any proofs of God’s existence in these pages—that’s merely an extended figure of speech, a way that the author characterizes his family, including his great brood of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Each one of them is counted as another “proof.” Craddock writes that he “accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior” when he was 8 or 9 years old, but his book is entirely about family rather than faith. He has written an autobiography, grounded first by sketching in details from the lives of his father (born in 1904) and mother (born in 1908), and then moving on to a brief account his sister Edna wrote of their family life before the author arrived on the scene. The narrative then kicks into a forward momentum it never loses when Craddock is born in Shelbyville, Tennessee, in 1944. Paralleling the author’s own story is a series of glimpses of his wife of 49 years, Paulette. In both cases, he tells the tale slowly and with copious small, personal details—40 pages of reading only finds Craddock in the fourth grade. He cites first crushes, childhood illnesses, little league triumphs (complete with stats), part-time summer jobs, and dozens of other staples of 20th-century American life. The account moves on to marriage, jobs, and children, and throughout, the tone remains consistently, even distractingly, private. He offers frequent asides clearly intended only for his own relatives, as when a chronological list of his family is followed by “and a host of nieces and nephews, WHOM I LOVE VERY MUCH!” The sincere book is low-key and filled with the humble benchmarks of a different era in American family life. Readers roughly Craddock’s own age will smile gratefully at his inclusion of so many quotidian details from their shared past.

A heartfelt but undramatic account of a family man in small-town Tennessee.