Younger Than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties

Younger Than That Now is a wonderful book, and much more than a saga of the 'sixties. It's a beautifully written, honest and moving story of two seemingly different people who achieve unity by struggling to understand each other and how they grow and change as a result. Ruth and Jeff pull no punches in their stories, and they come across with all the foibles that make up human nature, and in doing so, inspire the reader to see that there are no mistakes in life, just lessons. And even more than that, the book is a parable of the evolution of culture, and ultimately civilization as we see that how we affect each other as we negotiate the minefields of youth, relationships and politics can help us build a life we feel proud of.

This is an excellent memoir of friendship, honest and touching and moving and funny; of the passage of time and how it affects relationships. It's a book about the attraction of opposites and cultures, Ruth, a candidate for a Southern belle, Jeff a hippie radical from Long Island, and how they meet in less than propitious circumstances in the sixties - suspicion on both sides that changes and mellows into a lasting friendship. This is a chronicle of two people working out their lives and dreams and hopes in the changing times of America, from the sixties to now - from the pot-smoking days of the counterculture to the betrayals of Nixon and then through the bland years of consensus that have befallen American political life. Two intelligent voices and a damn good book.

This book coauthored by two people who shared a high school graduation year brought me back to my own life in those turbulent times. I remember the 1970 campus demonstration at my own campus as a lark by some radicals on a warm fall evening. The more conservative Ruth and the more liberal Jeff change places during the 70's and find they are both on a wandering course. As with many of their generation the responsibilities they gather add a certain sense of direction and purpose in their lives. For those of us who were there perhaps you will see a glimpse of yourself or someone you know. For our children this may help you to understand the events that molded your parents. This book chronicles the changes of the times and sets before the reader two very special lives and one very special relationship.

This is probably the one we've been looking forward to for a long time - a moving, no-holds-barred, enriching, open-hearted account of coming of age in America in the late 60s and early 70s. Jeff D and Ruth C W bring the times to life in a hundred ways, smells and sights and the half-forgotten names of politicos and rock bands and faded belief systems and hopes that were crushed or altered by the weight of time. In its own way it is an epic journey, personal and private, and public too, dealing with the small things in life as well as the big issues. Sad and funny, with whacky characters and eccentrics and originals and sweethearts, it's not a book to miss, if you remember the Steve Miller Band and Credence - and even if you don't, read it anyway for its humanity.

Younger Than That Now was, for me, a personal journey with kindred spirits back to the fire of my youth. Ruth and Jeff have generously opened up their most impressive friendship to the reader describing with both poignant earnestness and incisive humor their personal success at transcending differences. If they had merely focused on the amazing accomplishment of a heterosexual male and female managing a platonic friendship over time and space, it would have been newsworthy. But they wove in familiar names of our generation who have combined the social ideals of the 60's while honing entreprennurial savey reflective of our times (is there anyone who has NOT succumbed to the lure of Ben & Jerry's ice cream?) coupled with a delicious recounting of the regional idiosyncratic differences between northerners (ok, Yankees) and southerners, and threaded with the yarn of historical perspective. The writing reflected rich, descriptive prose that hung sensuously like the moss on a live oak coupled with clean, crisp journalistic insights. This book was a sheer delight to read. As a (yes, I admit it) born and raised Yankee--and middle-aged baby boomer--who has lived my entire adult life in the South, I felt like I had truly come home in the pages of this book both in the people that I met there and the places they inhabited.