Review: 'The Boys in the Bunkhouse,' by Dan Barry

In Texas in the mid-1960s, a canny rancher was looking for a solution to his problem of finding cheap labor for his out-of-state turkey processing plant. He found an untapped resource in a nearby institution for the intellectually disabled, arranging for a group of young men to be released and moved to a small town in Iowa, where they took up residence in an abandoned schoolhouse and began working at the plant.

Although the work was physically grueling, the men kept only pennies on the dollar of what they made. The town and its people were good to them, though, and the early days of their residence in Atalissa were a mix of Christmas parties at the schoolhouse, Sunday school classes and townspeople moving from skepticism and fear to a welcoming embrace of its newest citizens.

Over time, though, the men's situation worsened, as the rancher's oversight waned and his judgment faltered. The old schoolhouse fell further into disrepair, becoming a squalid hovel filled with fire hazards, cockroaches and a series of often abusive caretakers. The years of labor and lack of regular medical care took a toll on the men's bodies. Things got worse before they got better.

New York Times reporter Dan Barry's gifts lie in meting out the horror in small doses, though, never giving us more than we can handle, interweaving the hard stuff with moments of levity and grace.

It would be easy to present a story such as this one in black-and-white terms, all villains and heroes, pain and redemption. Barry skillfully manages to resist this trap, painting the book's characters with all of the nuance and gradation of the human experience.

He's clear on one point, though, and that is the innocence of these men, and the necessity for their stories to be told, a feat he accomplishes by his thorough and sensitive approach to writing this book.

The prose itself is at times luminous; hard-hitting journalism shot through with flourishes of the best literary nonfiction. Never losing his hold on the objectivity of the narrative, Barry dips into various points of view, putting the reader in the heads of players both individual and collective. He weaves history and facts into the work so deftly that they are almost invisible; with little to no effort, we find we've learned about the World War II-era Mexican Farm Labor Program, or the history of large-scale turkey processing, or changing attitudes and policies around the intellectually disabled in the United States over the past century.

"The Boys in the Bunkhouse" is, ultimately, a hopeful story of the power of a few dogged individuals to make change. Just as Barry sheds light on the lives of "the boys," so too does he celebrate the people who helped them on their journey to freedom: the social workers, the journalists, the state workers who put their own comfort, safety and health at risk in order to do the right thing.

Emily H. Freeman is a writer, and a teacher of writing, in Missoula, Mont.