Rascal The RaccoonThe Spring of my ninth year, my father and one of his friends caught a couple of baby raccoons, while on a fishing trip to Wisconsin, and brought them home to Illinois. Three years later, Sterling North’s Rascal the Raccoon was published. I had Scooter, a female raccoon, for nine years, and for the first four years, “Scootch was a companion to me much as was Sterling’s Rascal. The book Rascal the Raccoon was given to me as a Christmas present shortly after I turned 13, and is one of the few books I retained from my childhood. Fifty odd years later, I’ve revisited this wonderful and insightful book.Rascal is an autobiographical book about a year in Sterling North’s life.He lives with his father in a semi-rural Wisconsin home, and his mother has passed away four years prior. So, the two “men” have the run of the house, and Sterling is given great latitude in what he can do. All the while, the author has great responsibility and a sense of right and wrong. The gloom of World War l hangs over his town, and Sterling is no exception as his older brother Herschel was fighting in the trenches of France. The story begins in May of 1918.Into Sterling’s menagerie of pets including his St. Bernard Wowser and Poe-the-Crow, he brings a baby raccoon that must be hand fed. Bonding occurs and the boy and his raccoon become inseparable. The story is first person, but is an obvious reflection of North’s recollections 45 years after that year with Rascal. Rascal is loaded with warm and fuzzy moments (when he brought that baby raccoon home, it brought tears to my eyes, remembering when the not quite as young baby raccoon entered my life), as well as the problems that this intelligent little mammal is capable of instigating. North and I did many of the same things with our raccoons, such as riding a bicycle around town with our raccoons. Many ecology lessons are found in the book’s 174 pages of text, many vectored by the raccoon, some by Sterling’s father, and others from the boy Sterling himself.As an aside, the subtitle on my copy reads A Memoir of a Better Time. This may be subjective in regard to who and where you might be, But it appears that what moved Sterling North to write and his wide audience to read him . . . is nostalgia for a past when the struggle was with virgin lands and not with an environment corrupted by man.”The book is written at a level that can be appreciated by youngsters, up to adults. A younger reader may require a dictionary, but it’s literally at their fingertips), but should find the story enjoyable. If you have a young boy or girl interested in raccoons in particular and nature in general, I highly recommend this warm memoir of a different time and place, within the parameter of a years time.