Cruising State Growing Up in Southern California

"I know it's simplistic", writes Christopher Buckley, "but nine out of ten days all I want to do is drive an old Chevy again, lean back against the wide bench seat, switch the AM radio on to a game, shift that 3-speed on the column, and cruise with the windows down". You can almost feel the sun-warmed vinyl against the shoulder blades as you read this memoir of childhood and adolescence in California, the Golden State, in what now seems a golden time: the 1950s through the early 1970s. Cherishing a more innocent time and richer environment - a quality of life largely vanished now in America - Buckley vividly re-creates both the physical and social details of being young in that place and time. Buckley describes a bike ride "through a world shaped like a tunnel beneath the overhang of camphors, pine, and oaks", the perfect baseball glove "that would close like a Venus flytrap over any ball it touched", or the required tennis shoes: "If you were a surfer, they were blue". He also movingly recalls the particulars of his own experience: his restless, demanding father; the claustrophobia of a dead-end job at a grocery; and the dawning joy of discovering poetry and his own ability as a writer. What Buckley calls "the fire at the edge of things" - the blindingly rapid changes in society, politics, and technology - glows brightly throughout the eighteen narratives in the book. Any discussion of these issues takes place in the context of people's lives - either Buckley's or those of his friends - rather than in abstract terms. Cruising State is thus a document that is deeply personal, yet ultimately universal, not merely for members of the author's generation, but for all of us.Buckley, Christopher is the author of 'Cruising State Growing Up in Southern California' with ISBN 9780874172478 and ISBN 0874172470.