When penned by authors of passion and grace, memoirs lift their readers from the confines of their own lives into pasts made vivid through significant detail and memorable characters. Retrieving Times is such a memoir. Author Granville Austin was only five years old when his family moved to a small town called Norwich on the Vermont side of the Connecticut River in 1927. Back then, this vibrant community boasted more dirt roads than asphalt, and more farmers than professors from nearby Dartmouth College. In summer, there was haying and fishing, band concerts on the common and cool lemon Cokes...