Author Gary W. Barfknecht jokes that his baby-boom boyhood home in Virginia, Minnesota, wasn't exactly at the end of the world. But he could see it from there.

With energetic style and sly wit, this son and grandson of miners paints a vivid, fascinating portrait of his daily life in the harsh, frigid, isolated strip of mineral wealth known as the Mesabi Iron Range.

His entertaining, enlightening, compelling, sometimes poignant true stories and journal-type entries bring to life the unique challenges and pleasures of growing up in what he describes as essentially a small, insular foreign country, with its own culture, language, and one-of-a-kind terrain.