Customer Reviews

Houseboating in the Ozarks

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This is the one. This is THE book for the baby boom generation, 1946-1963. A must-read. This one picks up where Catcher in the Rye left off, after a half-century's break. This is Holden Caulfield in mid-life, at the precipice of old age, one foot in the tank. This book, Houseboating in the Ozarks, has the manic energy of the gospel of Mark, the kids' perspective of To Kill A Mockingbird, the whimsical "What's happening to me?" of Catcher in the Rye. And it provides no answers to anything, it just asks the usual questions. Like Saul Bellow's best stuff, this book might be summarized: "A guy wanders around." And the epilogue might be: "And then he stops." But along the way the main character, Christian Leonard Hooker, touches base with practically everything that happened in the sixties and seventies, before the Great Forgetting of the eighties & nineties. And his guiding angels are nine-year olds who know a lot more than he does. If you were born between 1946 and 1963, YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK. If you were born after 1963, you may want to read it just to see how screwed-up the baby boomers got to be. Those who don't understand history are condemned to repeat it. But a better quote is from Eric Hoffer: "In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

Houseboating in The Ozarks is a really good, fun read! Chris Hooker is a middle-aged man who has traveled the world and gotten in trouble in most places he's lived, and is now vacationing with his 9-yr-old twins. They've decided to rent a houseboat on Table Rock Lake in Southeastern Missouri. Their travels to and from this location fill the book with reminiscences of Hooker's childhood, his parents and grandparents, baseball and all those things that 9-year-olds are so quickly bored with, unless they can see right there where they are what Dad's talking about. But the twins teach Hooker way more than he teaches them and his love for them grows with each minute, it seems. Chris Hooker himself is still in the process of growing up -- this book chronicles a summer of coming-of-age and confronting some of the demons he's courted and fought throughout his life. Their adventures and misadventures add up to a really good read that I highly recommend.
I grew up in the same small town as the author and currently live in Missouri, which stars in the book as location and one of the very interesting characters that populate the novel. I felt that Gary Forrester had written this book just for me, but I know that anyone who takes the time to explore Houseboating will enjoy it immensely.