Coffee Tea or Me? - Donald Bain

   1967; 311 pages.  Full Title:  Coffee, Tea or Me?: The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Aviation Novel; Women Biographies; Memoirs.  Overall Rating: 6*/10.

 

    Are you tired of being a poor midwestern girl, stuck in one place?  Do you yearn to travel all over the world, every day?  Would you like to meet suitors on a daily basis?  Could someone show you how to tell which ones are truly eligible and which are already married?  What if you could occasionally meet and talk to some celebrities where you work?

 

    Does nightly partying with your fellow workers sound like it would be fun?  Maybe even have a couple of them as roommates sharing an apartment in some big city.  Wouldn’t it be great if someone was willing to pay you for having such experiences?

 

    Trudy Baker would be happy to tell you how to accomplish this.  She’s already living such a dream.  It’s called being a stewardess.

 

    And of course, she'll also alert you to some of the downsides to this career.

 

What’s To Like...

    There’s no overarching storyline in Coffee Tea or Me?, instead it’s 23 vignettes about various aspects of a stewardess’s life.  The text is written in the first-person POV, Trudy’s.  Some are autobiographical, Trudy is born and raised in Amarillo, Texas, yearns to see the world, and enrolls in a “stewardess school” where she is taught the ways and means of flying the friendly skies.  She also meets Rachel there, who becomes her best friend.

 

    A lot of the chapters give tips and insights about being a happy, outgoing, successful stewardess.  Trudy shares ways to deal with lusty aircraft captains, drunks, womanizers, and hyperactive kids, both the prodigies and the brats.  You’ll learn how male passengers stack up by profession and nationality, and where's the best place to stay with fellow aircraft personnel when you have a layover in various cities.  You’ll even be taught “stewardess lingo”.

 

    Coffee Tea or Me? was written in 1967, the year before I took my first flight, and it was fun to see how things have changed since then.  Back then, there was a 2-drink limit for passengers, although in-flight smoking was allowed.  If you forgot to get a pack of cigarettes at the airport, you could buy a mini-pack from the stewardess.  In-flight meals were standard fare and there was no assigned seating, so you had to tell the stewardess your name during preflight, so she could ascertain that you didn’t sneak on board.  And here's a couple non-flight things that are mentioned which have since disappeared: stationery stores, cigarette commercials, and girdles.

 

    The two final chapters form a sort of ending for the book.  Trudy has developed into a topnotch stewardess, but has become burnt out in the process.  The airline she works for arranges for her to see a shrink, with whom Trudy gets into competition to determine who will be analyzed and who will be asking the questions.  The title of the last chapter is: ”We’ll Give It One More Year. Okay?”, which gives a hint as to things close out.  Wikipedia indicates there are three more sequels to this book, which I never knew, and a TV movie, which I vaguely recall.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Popliteal (adj.) : relating to the hollow at the back of the knee.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.1*/5, based on 252 ratings and 80 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.28*/5, based on 1,395 ratings and 167 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Ladies and gentlemen, I am truly sorry.  Truly sorry.  In my haste to be . . . to be . . . to be gangrenous . . . Uh, gangre . . .  to give each and every one you gathered here today gift, I violated the sacrilege . . . a sacred by-laws of this wonderful airline, and these wonderful girls here present.  So. If you will be so kind and present, please put all those li’l bottles away and don’t drink not even a tiny weeny drop ‘til we come to our departure . . . ah, destination.”  (pg. 195)

 

    Gravely lacking any background, academic or practical, in the arts of humanities, engineers will try to make chit-chat about the aircraft’s performance characteristics or outer space or why the ball always comes down after it goes up.  It’s best to feign ignorance if you’re interested; engineers hate anyone to know anything about their sphere of knowledge.

    Occasionally, an engineer will have the brains to realize that a stewardess isn’t interested in all that mechanical routine.  This type of individual will say something like, “Have you read Moby Dick lately?”  You’ve got to give him credit for trying.  (pg. 255)

 

You can always recognize a captain from the calluses on his finger from pushing the call button for coffee.  (pg. 97)

    There is a moderate amount of cussing in Coffee Tea or Me?, mostly involving the word “damn”.  We’d yawn at this nowadays, yet I think it was pretty edgy for a lighthearted novel from the 1960s.  Each chapter opens with a sparse sketch, and some of those had nudity in them, but nothing that I’d label “erotic”.

 

    There are a fair number of typos, but keep in mind that this is long before we had computers with MS-Word and Spellchecker to catch such things.  At one point the “couch section” of the plane was mentioned.  At first I thought this was a typo for “coach section”, but now I’m thinking that some first-class sections of a plane back then were equipped with couches.

 

    Chapters 10 deals with homosexual passengers.  Trudy describes them as “fay”, “queer”, “faggy”, and “perverts”.  The term “gay” apparently had yet to be used, and it’s nice to see how far we’ve come since then.

 

    Coffee Tea Or Me? was a light-hearted, quick-&-easy read for me, bringing back memories of airline amenities and hospitality in an era that's long gone.  I have fond memories of flying back in those days, which were my college years and in which I was usually flying stand-by.  Alas, a lot of the experiences recounted in the book are probably make-believe.  See the next section for the aftermath.

 

    6 Stars.  Coffee Tea Or Me? readers received a shock in 2002 when a writer, Donald Bain, revealed that he actually wrote the book.  Bain worked in public relations for American Airlines at the time.  Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones were made-up names, and two Eastern Airlines stewardesses were hired to pose as them on book promotion tours.  Wikipedia says that one of them ended up legally changing her name to the one Don Bain used in the book.  The Wiki article is well worth reading.

My Hitch in Hell - Lester I. Tenney

   1995; 210 pages.  Full Title: My Hitch in Hell – The Bataan Death March.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : World War 2; Military history; Memoirs; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 9*/10.

 

    The Bataan Death March.  It was perhaps even more of a shock to the “American Invincibility” myth than our country's initial World War 2 event: the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor.

 

    Because the Death March came on the heels of something unthinkable: the complete surrender of the American forces stationed on the Bataan peninsula of the Philippines.  Americans surrendering?  To those sneaky Japanese?  Perish the thought.

 

    The Death March became a catalyst for intense hatred by America against Japan, and an effective recruitment tool.  Lots of books have been written about it, written by lots of authors.  Lester I. “Ten Spot” Tenney is one of them.  But he stands apart from the other writers in one crucial way.

 

    Lester Tenney was a participant in, and a survivor of, the Bataan Death March.

 

What’s To Like...

    As the book's subtitle suggests, the Bataan Death March certainly is the highlight of My Hitch in Hell, and the longest chapter is devoted to it.  However, that catastrophic event only lasted eight days (April 9-17, 1942), and this book actually chronicles Lester Tenney’s full 4-year stint of overseas US military service, 3½ years of which was spent as a POW of the Japanese.

 

    I was impressed by Tenney’s even-handed “ground-level view” of the fight for the Philippines.  It is portrayed in our history books as a noble sacrifice of the American forces to slow down the Japanese advance.  But snafus abounded (see Chapter 2 and the first excerpt below), and if you were part of the units being sacrificed, facing death, torture, starvation, and brutal beatings (see second excerpt below), you might more abandoned than noble.

 

    I was pleasantly surprised to find the rest of the book just as interesting as the Death March itself.  Lester Tenney’s decision to join a local National Guard unit in 1940 eventually resulted in his being stationed in the Far East.  After the Death March and captivity in two POW camps in the Philippines, he was shipped off to Japan itself to endure barbaric conditions while working in a coal mine.  Freed only once the war ended, the latter chapters recount his repatriation and return to the US, in some ways just as excruciating as his POW ordeals.

 

    It was enlightening to see the steps Lester took to keep his sanity intact and his spirits up.  One of his tricks was to learn some basic Japanese phrases from his captors so he could understand what they were screaming about.  It also helped to keep a mental image of his wife, in order to have something to motivate him to stay alive.

 

    There were lighter moments as well.   Lester sets up a craps game while on the prison ship headed to Japan, which eased everyone’s mind since allied submarines were torpedoing any and all boats flying the Rising Sun flag and the Japanese refused to mark prison ships with Red Cross markings.  At the POW camp in Japan he helped set up, with the permission of the commandant, a musical talent show titled “The Ziegfeld Follies of 1944”.  He also arranged a sort of  black market goods-exchange system where items were bartered between both POW and Japanese patrons, with the middle man (Lester) charging an “agent’s fee”.

 

    The ending is bittersweet.  Lester comes home to a postwar America that has changed a lot in the five years he’s been away.  His wife Laura also has changed, and that needs attending to, especially since they had married in secret.  War is hell, even for the victors.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 220 ratings and 98 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.35*/5, based on 399 ratings and 62 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    We still did not have any training on the new tanks.  While we were in Honolulu, our commander tried to borrow two 37mm (the types mounted in our new tanks) and enough ammunition to practice from our transport deck while en route to the Philippines; but post ordnance in Hawaii refused this request.  When our tank unit arrived in the Philippines, we asked for the use of a firing range so that we could become familiar with the weapons mounted in our new tanks.  This request was also denied.  Therefore, it was not until the Japanese bombers and Zeros came over Clark Field that we were able to get in our “practice.”  On-the-job training does not work very well under these conditions.  (pg. 19)

 

    One of the men had a very bad case of malaria and had barely made it to the rest area.  He was burning up with fever and severely disoriented.  When ordered to stand up, he could not do it.  Without a minute’s hesitation, the guard hit him over the head with the butt of his gun, knocked him down to the ground, and then called for two nearby prisoners to start digging a hole to bury the fallen prisoner.  The two men started digging, and when the hole was about a foot deep, the guard ordered the two men to place the sick man in the hole and bury him alive.  The two men shook their heads; they could not do that.

    Once again without warning, and without any effort to settle the problem any other way, the guard shot the bigger of the two prisoners.  (pg. 57)

 

“Anyone can learn Japanese in ten easy beatings.”  (pg. 100)

    There’s not a lot of profanity in My Hitch in Hell, which surprised me, given the gruesome settings.  I noted just 8 instances in the first 50% of the book, and these were of the "milder" ilk.  This was helped by the author often choosing non-vulgar options when he was able, such as defecate, urinate, bowels, anus, feces, and others.

 

    There were some negative reviews at Amazon for this book.  Some people wondered whether the author “tweaked” some events to make himself look good.  That’s possible, but hey, that could be true in any autobiography, and I’d counter that quite often Lester suffers beatings for getting caught doing something underhanded, or for no reason at all other than Japanese barbarity.  Others thought the writing was rather amateurish.  They have a point, but I thought it added to the realism of the account.

 

    For me, My Hitch in Hell was a brutal and eye-opening read.  I’ve read about the Bataan Death March in my history books.  It’s quite different to “see” it through the eyes of one who survived it.

 

    9 Stars.  One last thing.  On pages 211-213 in the back of the book there's an Appendix listing the 80 servicemen in Lester Tenney’s unit who didn’t make it back, along with (where known) their place, date, and cause of death.  It made for a sobering read.

Boom!: A Baby Memoir 1947-2022 - Ted Polhemus

   2012; 402 pages.  Full Title : Boom! – A Baby Boomer Memoir 1947-2022.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Non-Fiction; Memoir; Pop Culture.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

    "OK Boomer."

    What in the world did we Boomer Babies do to make that catchphrase become so popular?

    I mean, I know we brag about our music, but hey, it really is the best ever.  The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Bob Dylan.  None of today’s bands can touch those groups.  Yeah, if you want to get technical about it, none of those acts featured musicians who actually were baby-boomers, but we claim them as our own anyway.

    Our drugs were better, too.  Getting high on weed and tripping on acid.  Grooving to cosmic vibes and psychedelic colors, while the lyrics to Donovan's "Mellow Yellow".  Can today’s opioids and other meds give you anything like that?  Nah, I didn’t think so.

    Even the sex was better back then.  Free love and all that.  Birth control pills were just becoming readily available and AIDS had yet to appear in the world.  Talk about perfect timing.

    And last but not least, we had the best protests.  We’d turn out by the thousands to shut down colleges, chant slogans, and get our heads bashed in.  Man, I love the smell of tear-gas in the morning.  So what d’ya say about all that, young‘uns?

    “OK Boomer.”

What’s To Like...

    Boom! is a memoir, a genre I rarely read.  The author is Ted Polhemus, a genuine baby-boomer, since he was born in 1947.  Ted started out life in Neptune City, a small town in New Jersey, close to the more-famous rock-&-roll mecca of Asbury Park.  He studied anthropology at Temple University, and has lived in the UK for the past 30+ years.  So he’s gotten to observe the Boomer culture firsthand from both the American and English perspectives.

    The book is divided into 11 chapters, namely:

Ch. 1: 1947 - Introduction

Ch. 2: Coming Home – First four years

Ch. 3: Suburban Life – Moving to the suburbs

Ch. 4: Modern Times – The teens

Ch. 5: Sex

Ch. 6: Drugs

Ch. 7: Rock ‘n’ Roll

Ch. 8: Protest

Ch. 9: Swinging in London – Moving across the pond

Ch. 10: No Future – The birth of Punk

Ch. 11: 2022 – Where we’re heading

    Being a memoir, the author recounts a bunch of his personal experiences, but only as they relate to the Baby Boomer culture.  I’m three years younger than Ted Polhemus, so a lot of what he went through resonated with me.  He remembers exactly where he was when JFK was shot; so do I.  He revels in the childhood memory of family trips to the local Carvel Soft Ice Cream store; so do I.  His first plane trip was in 1969; mine was in 1968.   He laughs at the silliness that arises in a couple of his acid trips (including dimension-hopping and a cat exorcism); so can I.

     There’s a heavy emphasis on the music of the times, and the author's tastes in that area are excellent.  Asbury Park gave us Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny, two of  Ted's and my favorite rockers.  The author seems to not think much of Prog Rock, and we’ll have to agree-to-disagree on that one.  But his tastes in literature and movies/TV are also top-notch.

    Era-specific trivia abounds, and I loved it.  Hugh Hefner, the patriarch of Playboy magazine, was raised a strict Methodist.  There is no apostrophe in the biker-gang name “Hells Angels”, I never noticed that before.  And “Levittown” was a nationwide phenomenon that greatly catalyzed the 1950s mass exodus from cities to suburbs; I remember billboards touting one of those Levittowns close to where I grew up.

    The e-book version is 375 pages long, but the text actually ends at page 315.  The next 40 pages are titled “Sources and Inspirations”, and are simply pop-culture lists divided into headings of Music, Films, TV shows, Fiction Books, and Non-Fiction Books, all of which show you what tickles the author's fancy.  This is followed by a Timeline and some Polhemus family photographs which aid in getting a feel for life as a baby boomer.

    The final chapter, enigmatically titled “2022”, is Ted Polhemus’s predictions on how what’s in store for the aging Baby Boomers.  Written in 2012, it is well thought-out, but pessimistically bleak.  Today, eight years later and a mere two years before 2022, I am happy to say the most of the forecast doom-and-gloom has not panned out. 

 Kewlest New Word ...

Twee (adj.) : excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental.

Others: Semiological (adj.)..

Excerpts...

    Despite everything which happened in fashion, style and music, 1947’s most significant historical influence was ultimately one of simple demographics.

    There were 3.9 million of us born in America in 1947.  It had been 3.47 million in 1946.  Compared to only 2.8 million in 1945.  A similar “baby boom” occurred throughout much of the world following in the wake of the end of WWII, and had a remarkable impact on world history – a reverberating impact which is still being felt in the 21^st century; this simple demographic blip and its underlining of a generational model of history (“my generation”) becoming the key storyline which shaped the narrative of the post-war world.  (loc. 228)

    In a nutshell, the problem with Rock minus Roll was you couldn’t dance to it.

    OK, you could wave your hands around or jump about a bit, but in truth very few of us even did this.  Watch the DVD of Woodstock where, a handful of happy Hippies cavorting about at the beginning and end excepted, what you have is half a million white people sat on their butts looking up at a stage.  When, finally, Soul Funksters Sly and the Family Stone come on, we realize what’s been missing: syncopation – the “ugh”, that slight but all important warping of the space-time continuum which, once Rock had arrived, would have to seek sanctuary in Soul and Funk.  (loc. 2002)

Kindle Details…

    The Kindle version of Boom! sells for $6.00 at Amazon right now.  ANAICT, the only other e-book available at Amazon by this author is StreetStyle, which sells for $14.99.   Ted Polhemus has more than 20 other books to offer in “real book” format; you can see the complete list at Wikipedia.

 “The teenager may first have been pandered to in America, but Britain handed them the keys and, blowing raspberries at the Old Guard, just told them to get on with it.”  (loc. 2584 )

    There are a couple of nits to pick, none of which involve the book's content.  From least important to most:

    The photos are cool, and can be expanded, but not in the usual “finger-stretching” way.  Instead of tapping on a pic, press on it.  A menu will pop up which includes the option to zoom.  This then activates the finger-stretching technique.

     Like any memoir/autobiography, there is probably a bit of “skewing” of events in the past to the author’s favor.   Most of the personal things here seem reasonable, with the possible exception of the airplane sexploit at the end of Chapter 5.

    Finally, for an author with 20+ books to his credit, the editing here is atrocious.  Typos abound, and some passages get repetitious.  The most egregious typo was “Jimmy Hendrix”.  It’s “Jimi”.  Dude, that’s unforgiveable.  😎

    But I pick at nits.  Overall, I found Boom! to be an fascinating and nostalgic read.  Ted Polhemus presents the history of the Baby Boomer era in an objective fashion – noting both its plusses and minuses, and that's a big plus.

    7 Stars.  In looking at Ted Polhemus’s bibliography at Wikipedia, Boom! seems like a one-off effort, unrelated to his other works.  I sorta get the feeling this was a “bucket list” item, written by a 65-year-old Baby Boomer looking back over his life.  If so, the project was a success.

The Essential Ginsberg - Allen Ginsberg

   2015; 451 pages.  New Author? : Yes.    Genre : Non-Fiction; Poetry; Memoirs; Reference.  Overall Rating : 6*/10.

    Allen Ginsberg, born 06/03/26, died 04/05/97, and arguably one of the three most recognizable names associated with the “Beat Generation” movement in the 1950’s.  If Timothy Leary was the spokesman for the movement (“turn on, tune in, drop out!”), and Baba Ram Dass was its spiritual guru (“be here now!”), then Ginsberg was its poet laureate (“whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.”).

    Since I’m a child of the 60’s, the Beat Generation is slightly before my time.  And while I could probably tell you that Ginsberg’s most famous poem is titled “Howl”, I couldn’t quote a line from it.  Indeed, while I could cite quotes by Leary and Ram Dass, I had to google Allen Ginsberg quotes to find one to fit in the previous paragraph.

    Which is sad, since Ginsberg’s poetry was a guiding light back then for a young generation who no longer felt content to live the “Leave It To Beaver” lifestyle, where housewives wore dresses and pearl necklaces to cook supper, and Father Knows Best.

    So for me personally, it was time to get acquainted with the writings of Allen Ginsberg.  

What’s To Like...

    The Essential Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher, is much more than simply a collection of Ginsberg’s poems.  It is divided into the following sections:

Part 00 : Introduction (4%)

    A brief overview of Allen Ginsberg’s life by the editor.

Part 01 : Poems (5%)

    The biggest section of the book, and my favorite.  The timespan is 1947-1997.

Part 02 : Songs (39%)

    The shortest section, but my second-most favorite.

Part 03 : Essays (43%)

    Long-winded, yet insightful.  Ginsberg describes feeling “sent” to enlighten us about poetry.

Part 04 : Journals (59%)

    Less pretentious than ‘Essays’, and more revealing.

Part 05 : Interviews (66%)

    Only two interviews, and both dragged for me.

Part 06 : Letters (78%)

    Self-tales of Ginsberg’s travels and misadventures.

Part 07 : Photographs (97%)

    Mostly of his Beat Generation pals.  Tip : The photos are expandable in the Kindle!

    Allen Ginsberg’s overall writing style is basically to convey exactly what thoughts are going through his mind at the present time.  He engages in editing/revising only grudgingly, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a poem, a letter, an interview, or whatever.  This is both a positive and a negative: you get a very honest take on what it was like to be a stand-out member of the Beat Generation, but if you were aiming to do some hero-worship, you’re going to be sorely disillusioned by his candor.

    Unsurprisingly, for me, the best part of the book is the “Poems” section.  Howl is there, and lots of others., all arranged chronologically.  Most, but not all, of Ginsberg’s poems have no meter or rhyme scheme, but a few were, and it was nice to discover he really could write structured poems if he wanted to.   Similarly, the songs, though sparse in number, are inherently metered and rhyming which, frankly is how I prefer my prose 

    For the second time in my last couple of e-books, the footnotes are slickly done, so this may be an improvement done by Kindle.  OTOH, the font sizes varied greatly; that’s something Kindle needs to work on.  I also liked the photographs, they put “faces” on a bunch of the Beat Generation luminaries that heretofore were just names to me.

    I especially enjoyed Ginsberg’s poetic reflections on growing old; there’s a gentleness there that counterbalances the shock-jock effect of his earlier poems. And the poem “Wales Visitation” was apparently done under the influence of LSD, which made for an interesting read.  Also, it was fun to learn the origin of the phrase “Beat Generation”, and I also marveled how extensively he managed to travel, given that most of the time, he was truly a “starving artist”.

 Kewlest New Word ...

Prosody (n.) : the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry.

Others : Panegyric (n.).

Excerpts...

    Will that happen to me?

    Of course, it’ll happen to thee.

    Will my arms wither away?

    Yes yr arm hair will turn gray.

    Will my knees grow weak & collapse?

    Your knees will need crutches perhaps.

    Will my chest get thin?

    Your breasts will be hanging skin.

    Where will go – my teeth?

    You’ll keep the ones beneath.

    What’ll happen to my bones?

    They’ll get mixed up with stones.  (loc. 2588, from the poem ‘Don’t Grow Old’)

    At this point, Ken Kesey – a man whom you may have heard of as a major contemporary novelist – who lives near San Francisco and sympathized with both marchers and Angels, intervened.  We all had a party at the Hell’s Angels house.  Most everybody took some LSD, and we settled down to discussing the situation and listening to Joan Baez on the phonograph, and chanting Buddhist prayers.  (loc. 3866)

Kindle Details...

    The Essential Ginsberg sells for $10.99.  There are a number of other (non-poetry) books available that are authored or co-authored by Ginsberg – mostly letters, memoirs, or books about other members of the Beat Generation, and ranging in price from $9.00 to $15.99.  If you’re looking for books containing his poetry you can go “sparse” with a 47-page version of Howl and Other Poems ($2.99) or “comprehensive” with the 1000+page  Collected Poems 1947-1997 ($9.99).

 “It should be easier for a poet to understand a revolution than for a revolution to understand poetry.”  (loc. 3664)

    There were some quibbles.  As good as the Poems and Songs sections were , the Essays and Journals sections seemed at times pretentious and slow to me.  And while Ginsberg’s honesty is laudable, what I saw was a sometime jaundiced poet/writer who often just wanted to get high, get naked, go to orgies, and shove the adoring flower children out of his life.  In the end, his writings reinforced my opinion that all self-proclaimed spiritual leaders, regardless of denomination or particular religion, are a bunch of narcissistic charlatans.

    Allen Ginsberg was both a complex and troubled soul; a Jewish, homosexual, New Yorker who was into gurus, meditation, and all sorts of drugs.  He was anti-war, anti-nuclear energy, and loved to write explicitly about gay and hetero sex.  His poems will challenge you, shock you, and maybe even enlighten you.  It’s too bad the other sections didn’t do likewise for me.

    6 Stars.  I think I would’ve enjoyed The Essential Ginsberg more if it were laid out in strict chronological order, regardless of what kind of writing a piece was.  After the Poems & Songs were done (at 39% Kindle), the rest of the book was a slog until the photographs at the very end.  Still, I am happy I took the time to explore Allen Ginsberg’s writings; it was a worthwhile and enriching experience.

The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid - Bill Bryson

2006; 268 pages. Genre : Fiction. Overall Rating : A..

    I'd describe Bill Bryson as a kinder, gentler David Sedaris, although there is still a lot of hyperbole and caustic wit to go around. TL&TotTK is a series of memoirs about Bryson's boyhood days. He was born in 1951, so this is primarily about life in the late 1950's to early 1960's, growing up in Des Moines, Iowa.

What's To Like...
    Simply put - this is as hilarious of a book as I've ever read. From cover to cover, I kept laughing out loud, which was distracting to Liz as she read.
.
    And since I was born within a year of Bryson, a lot of his boyhood memories are also mine. Things like : silly putty and slinkies; lincoln logs and model airplanes; Sky King and Roy Rogers; bumper cars and fig newtons; wearing galoshes to school and being sent to the cloakroom; and the widest selection of comic books that any generation ever enjoyed. Last but not least, the stupidest, annoyingest, inanest game/toy that was ever invented - electric football.
.

What's Not To Like...
    Not much, since I give this an "A". Most of the negative reviews seem to come from dittoheads who are irked that Bryson at times reminisces about the political foibles of that time period. Yes, we had hula hoops and TV dinners. But we also had a House of Un-American Activities Committee; rampant segregation, and A-bomb tests in the Nevada desert that spewed radioactive fall-out all over the country. Sorry, guys. That's part of this era as well.

   .The other negative that got cited a lot - and I happen to agree with this - is that Bryson sprinkles the book with a few too many 4-lettered words. I have no moral objection to that, provided it serves a purpose. Here, it seemed to be forced and unnecessary.

    .Finally, while those aged 50-65 will relate to this book, there may be a bit of a disconnect for anyone younger.
.
Where's Billy?
    For a popular author with a dozen books to his credit, finding Bryson's books in a bookstore is a daunting challenge. Yeah, I could ask the help desk, but where's the sport in that?
.
    You'd think his books would be filed under "Humor", but neither store did that. TL&TofTK was over in the "Literature" section at Borders, but that was the only Bryson book there. This past weekend, I found a stash of his other books at the used bookstore under "Travel". They're still written in Sedaris-style, but deal with living in England, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and/or traveling around Australia. He has a couple linguistic-themed books to his credit, and I still haven't found where either store stashes those.

   .I don't think I've enjoyed a book this much since Slaughterhouse Five. I can see me going on a Bryson kick for the next few months. If you want to get a feel for the bright side of the 1955-65 decade, this is as good as it gets. As for its darker side, well, that's what the book I'm reading now is all about.