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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tribute to a generation that has few tributes..., August 5, 2003
This review is from: Lake Effect (Paperback)
Rich Cohen's book is terrific. It is easy enough to be read in one sitting. However, I would recommend taking your time--like the summer idylls he describes in the book. The prose is easy going, but at times it is beautiful. Talking about writing his memories of childhood Cohen says, "On the page these memories becamne stories. In this way, they were preserved and destroyed, taken from my mind and fixed in place. Never again could they haunt me in quite the same way." Indeed, this what the book partially does for Rich Cohen. It is also about friendships and in reading about them, I could hear the songs of Harry Chapin. That was music I listened to with my friends from the North Shore (although I was a city boy) about a half decade after Cohen left town. He is lyrical about growing up. He is also honest. He captures the essence of leaving behind your childhood. He never claims that things happened exactly as he puts them down on the page--there are no claims of objective truth. He writes beautifully of his own memories and in that he transcends the facts. His growing up was different than some readers (drugs, etc), but it makes the feelings no less universal. I hesitate to make the comparison of Cohen's book to some of Bob Greene's work. Greene's work is about a different generation that is often remembered by it's own members. Greene tends to remember things in an innocent, nostalgic way, whereas Cohen has a harder edge honesty about his work--a raw quality that fits his persona. However, what strikes me about both Chicago writers is that they both love the world that created them. They honor memories. There is much to be said for that. Cohen is giving voice to Generation X in a way that few writers have (it is about time someone wrote about us in this way). He is normal kid who is not confessing about his prozac nation, some sad abuse, or any of the other shocking claims of memoirs of Gen X. Cohen loves his friends. His friendships were filled with hope, love, and dreams. Jaime may be a lot like Ferris Bueller, but I think he was real. So is Cohen and so are his memories.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Book About Friendship I've Read, May 26, 2002
By A Customer
Cohen is brave and funny (he's the kind of explorer who makes jokes about termites when the mast breaks) and he's grabbed a topic that's tough and delicate at the same time: How do our friends make us who we are? Do we go after friends to become the kinds of people we'd like to be? The big question -- the "Lake Effect" Cohen's talking about -- is how did we become us? It's an act of personal anthropology, and that's the book's first level: we pull one thing from one friend because we know it's what makes them cool, we drop another thing off of our personal menu because we see it's knocking out the other guys, we pick movies, books, TV shows and records and experiences and situations because that's the pile of stuff we want to climb on top of to look at the world from. Cohen spends his time picking the exact right moments; it's a series of discoveries and firsts, the Lewis and Clark stuff of expeditioning into what will become our lives: first parties, first beers, first girls, first jobs, first cars, and he pushes himself to find the exact right items. I don't think I ever understood the exact personal growth potential of a first hangover untl I read "The Lake Effect." But, as I say, that's only the first level. The real thing here is atmosphere. Elsewhere, Cohen has given us hints about his life -- he's used metaphors from a pretty standard suburban upbringing to nail down the feel of entirely un-standard situations. (Describing, in "Tough Jews," the electric chair in terms of its non-Barcalounger comfort, or his relatives, in family vacation snapshots, "looking determined to have fun." In "Tough Jews," he explains crime, which first generation immigrants climbed as their entry into the American economy but which they talked their own children away from, as "a ladder they pulled up after them." ) Here he goes inside out, and that suburban life is the whole book, and he makes you feel it. He seems to have compressed a whole book out of the things we've forgotten. It's almost a dare, as if Cohen was walking behind us throughout our childhoods picking up stuff, and it turned out our memories had holes in their pockets. Here's something you forgot. Here's something else you forgot. Here's one more thing you didn't remember. And now here it is in my book. The atmosphere is of bidding time until you can get to be an adult and go out there, and of the kids knowing it and appreciating it. The feel is of sensation and luck. The visuals of a bonfire by the beach --- the orange and floating sparks, and the lap of the water -- and the sound of girls laughting and the grainy aluminum-can sips of beer. He puts you back there, as sure as time travel, and makes you remember how pleasantly, thrillingly unimportant it felt. He makes you remember how most of adolescence pretty much felt like a summer weekend. And he reminds you of the friends who helped you see that's what it was. Cohen's best friend Jamie, who helps him understand this, gets trapped in that Sunday world once the workweek of adulthood gets started up. Cohen gets that too -- the shame and guilt when you leave friends behind. The book reads like "On The Road" crossed with "Ferris Beuller" - you could call it "On The Lawn," and you'd be close to what the book is like. The word-group "beautiful writing" has ended up with a meaning that makes me itch to turn my TV back on. It seems to mean quiet, and deliberate metaphors, and careful hushes for presentation: "beautiful writing" seems to mean the kind of miniature stuff that could get passed around at a dollhouse convention. Cohen's writing is "beautiful" because it's muscular and apt, and it's the voice we wish, at our best, we always thought in: the metaphors come from cartoons, album covers, newspapers, the stoner world, fast food. Cohen has built his book out of things that fly in through the car window when we're driving out on a cool night for a first date, with the friends who are always in the back of our minds joking and kidding and scolding from the back seat. It's an astonishing thing to have brought off. It feels dumb to talk about it as a "memoir" - since even just that word has that fake, dollhouse sound. This book doesn't seem to have already happened to someone else; it happens as we read it, right there in the words, and it seems to be happening, all over again, to us.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A nice memoir of adolescence and its loss, July 18, 2003
This review is from: Lake Effect (Paperback)
I have difficulty understanding what critics of the book wanted from it. I am an ex-Chicagoan (I even lived there during the book's mid-80s), but grew-up working class a short walk from a different great lake in a different state. Cohen's life wasn't mine, but I had no trouble identifying with the desire to be taken away by people cooler and more interesting than my peers, while still hanging out with a ragtag group of them, anyway. Much of the book is really about his best friend, Jamie, the cool kid with a mysterious, little spoken past that turns out to be different from the past he wanted everyone else (including himself) to know about. The book is at its weakest when Cohen recounts his time at Tulane with characters who are over-privileged, inadequate substitutes for Jamie. This also is the one part of the book that's really more about Cohen than about Jamie, who is obviously the more interesting character. The irony of the story is that Cohen grew up while Jamie, the worldy dreamer, works in a low rent dream factory in Hollywood. The book is wonderfully evocative of Chicago (less so of New Orleans) and Cohen offers a gassy acknowledgment to the city of his birth, a city that deserves better than that. Fortunately, the text of the book overcomes all that and reminds us how our lives change in ways we don't expect, and certainly don't understand while the changes are happening. A few quibbles: Royko had moved to the Tribune by the mid-80s (he refused to work for Rubert Murdoch, for good reason) and Roanoke is in Virginia, not West Virginia--get a map, Rich.
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