Paul Warner, "'A Captain Departed’, and Other Useful Memoirs," The Philadelphia Inquirer

This is a season rife with memoirs. Especially it abounds in voices of the road. We have had the picaresque and the jaunty, the devil-may-care and the braggart. “Waiting for Nothing” (Knopf) is a book of another sort. Nowt that it is published, Tom Kroner will know better days. None the less it sounds a heart-breaking call from the depths. Here is voice of those that live, and yet are hopeless, the myriad victims of our great depression:
“I cannot think of years of any more. I cant think only of the drags I have rode, of the bulls that have sapped up on me, and the mission slop I have swilled. People I have known I remember no more. They are gone. They are out of my life. I cannot remember them at all. Even my family, my mother, is dimmed by the strings of drags with their strings of cars that are always with me in mind though the long, cold nights. Whatever is gone before is gone. My life is spent before it is started”.
Elsewhere Kroner writes: “What can a stiff do? You ask for work, and they laugh at you for asking for work. There is no work. I hardly ever ask for work anymore”