Customer Reviews

Lost In Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia

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I just happened across Salzman's video of "Iron & Silk" (about his experiences teaching English and learning wushu in China) and I was so charmed, I decided to give "Lost in Place" a try. From page one I was laughing out loud. There is much more here than just a boy's quest to be a wandering Zen monk from the age of 13. He also has a sometime career as a cellist, a summer as a pothead and an everlasting struggle with the public school system. The main theme of this book is that basic question: what's the purpose of my life? Salzman explores this in tandem with touching vignettes of his relationship with his implacable father, an amateur astronomer, painter and disenchanted social worker.

As someone who has recently taken up martial arts, I enjoyed the descriptions of Salzman's early training. How I'm glad I didn't go to his school!

The book is a quick, pleasureable read. Even though Salzman describes some dark times in his life, his self-analysis is too interesting to put down. I wish I could recommend this to the under 18 crowd, but due to vivid descriptions of drug use, a lot of musings about sex and a lot of profanity on the part of his kung fu instructor, I'd hesitate to give this book to any but the most mature of teenagers. Highly recommended for parents trying to renew their familiarity with the teenage mind, though!

I started reading Lost In Place one night when I couldn't sleep. I laughed so loud and long I awoke my husband sleeping upstairs who came down to check on why I was, he thought, wailing and weeping. Tears of amusement, certainly. There isn't a wrong note in this memoir. The gloomy father remarked upon in some customer reviews is hardly any gloomier than most fathers raising kids in the 70's and unlike a good many of them, he retained the deep love and respect of his son. I have given it to my own kids (16 and 19) to read, to kids graduating from high school this year. A friend of my sixteen-year-old read it in two days and it was the only nonrequired book she read all year. For those who grew up in the 70's it will strike one kind of chord; for any adolescent it is a shining example of how becoming caught up in an obsession, of training oneself (voluntarily), of learning everything you can about something can turn out to be the most important thing you ever do. Comic books, kung fu, BB guns, decorating teeshirts--these are paths to Yale as surely as being the scholar/athlete held out as exemplars by our high schcols.

We read this for our book group and everyone in the group -- folks from about 50 into their early 70's -- thought it was great. Salzman captures the mind of the teenage boy and presents it in a wonderfully well written story. I had finished it and my wife then kept me awake for two nights with her chuckles as she read it. The mother in the story does not get much press but she is the real hero in Mark's life. She supports each of his youthful plunges into finding his way in life from the little kid in the box playing like a captain on a space mission to his leaving high school a year early after getting himself into Yale before graduating from high school. I am certain that we would have never seen this wonderful book had it not been for his mother and her fierce support for Mark as he worked through life "Absurd in Suburbia."

I have read two of his other books and have just ordered the only one that I have not yet read.

Anyone who has enjoyed Mark Salzman's book and subsequent film "Iron and Silk" will love the glimpse at Salzman's adolescence offered in "Lost in Place." This warm and honest introspective look at the author's childhood is charming and funny. The author's love of martial arts and all things Asian manifested itself early, and Salzman's accomplishments as an adult have blossomed from his early eccentricities. Salzman was a bizarre kid, and this fact makes for terrific storytelling (at one point, he attempted to become a Zen monk, living austerely in the basement of his family home). The author has a natural, easy-going writing style that is at the same time intelligent and concise. He admits to the stranger moments of his adolescence with grace and dignity, and treats his accomplishments humbly. "Growing Up Absurd" is such a terrific story - Salzman's early teen experiences make a case for the adage "from humble beginnings come great things!." With a childhood like this (weird as he was), it's easy to see how Salzman grew up to be a great writer and filmmaker.

If you like stories about other people's lives and their amusing mishaps this book is for you. Mark Salzman tells the tall of his usual at times hilarious life Imagine growing up in middle class Connecticut with not so usual dreams. From the time Mark was seven he has dreamt of being a famous concert cellist. Unfortunately as the years pass he loses interest in the cello but his mom pressures him into staying with it. Mark has a great tendency to thrust into things as you'll find out in the book. In my opinion this was a great read; and I am by no means a reader but this book went by relatively quickly. I found that I related really well to Mark and I think other guy and girls my age will find his mishaps funny.
After watching his first Kung fu movie Mark Salzman decides his goal and dream in life is to achieve enlightenment and nirvana like the kung fu masters in the movie. He decides to turn the basement into a Zen meditation shrine. This in my opinion is one of the funniest parts of the book. He decides to furnish the basement with "Chinese artifacts" from the cooking supply store. In actuality it is the only store where there is anything even remotely Chinese. He also found the need to look like an old kung fu master and gets a bald wig in the back of a comic book, but unfortunately for him it is grey and looks nothing like a skin tone. He also tries to dye his pajama pants black, but that too goes wrong. The dye ends up not setting and Mark is left with purple pajama pants. Through the intense fog of incense Mark studies the Kung Fu forms from books he had got at the local library.
When he starts high school he also decides to start taking kung fu lessons. This is because he starts watching of all the Chinese kung fu movies. The Kung Fu craze was best associated with the man Bruce Lee. Through the help of eccentric and at times abusive Sensei O'Keefe Mark goes on a journey to help him achieve enlightenment. This book is at times of a graphic nature. One day Mark is practicing kung fu in the woods when the school bully, Michael Dembsy, who has been like a wrathful god to Mark his life, becomes enthralled with kung fu. He starts taking lessons along side mark and soon they form a quirky but strong bond between them. After countless competitions and bruises, and a few years, Mark feels he has "Kung Fu'ed" out and quits lessons with Sensei O`Keefe. As tough as Michael is he is secretly devastated and the friendship disincarnates over the next year.
I thought his mother was very real and when she did something mean to Mark I got mad at her as if she did it to me. I thought that Mark and his father's relationship were very spiritual. I thought that because they are always looking at the stars and the galaxies. Often big issues and topics on Mark or his father's mind come out into the open on these late night star watches.
Read this book if your ages 12- 16. I think is directed for teens but written for younger kids; the diction was pretty simple and I didn't find it that challenging.

Memoir of Mark Salzman's adolescent years in Connecticut. Outrageously funny in spots, touching in others, and interesting throughout. The author's description of Sensei O'Keefe and the stories surrounding the Kung Fu Dojo are riotous. Ed, his eternally pessimistic father, adds another element of humor to the story. The novel describes an eccentric teenager's failed attempts to "change myself into something I'm not. The story of my life." He obsessively pursues first Kung Fu to become a fearless warior, then years of cello training to achieve a dream of becoming a concert celloist, and majors in Chinese at Yale because "it was the one subject I had a head start in and could therefore look smarter than I really was." The book is a good reflection back on the eccentricities of adolescence with a profound message offered in the end.

This book is an absolute gem. How often do you come across a martial arts book that is not just well written but genuinely, heartbreakingly funny? Mr. Salzman has already shown us he can write in his first book, Iron and Silk, the story of his two years spent in China teaching English and practicing wushu with Pan Qing Fu. The book was later made into a critically acclaimed film of the same name. In Lost in Place, the author lets us in on the secrets of his adolescence. Anyone who has ever been seized by the desire to shave his head, dye his pyjamas purple, and abandon the fast food of suburbia for the wandering life of a Zen monk will love this book.
We follow Salzman through the perils of teenage life, goofing off at school and then frantically trying to make up, agonizing about dates, buying his first car, choosing what to study at university, and in general giving his long suffering family a hard time, and all of this while struggling between Eastern and Western worldviews. We meet some strange people he encountered in his attempts to become a Bruce Lee clone, such as the ominous Sensei O'Keefe, the rowdy and foul-mouthed master of the Chinese Boxing Institute, with his dreaded brainwave, "cemetery sparring". Apart from the stories of Salzman's various martial art experiences, some hilarious and some appalling, there are some well drawn scenes of his interaction with his father, who is described as a good natured pessimist, probably not a bad thing to be for someone forced to compete with the glamorous Bruce Lee for his son's affections. There is a lovely scene of his father listening to an outpouring of his son's existential angst. We get a picture of a gentle, mature man with a nice sense of irony. He must be proud now of how his son has turned out. Salzman has written four critically acclaimed novels, one of which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Review Award. He is a great storyteller and this book will not let you down.

A GREAT READ. If you have any memories of adolescence, this book will make you laugh out loud. Salzman is a master storyteller, even telling the smallest anecdote. What I really like about this author is that his books are strikingly different from one another -- from "Iron and Silk" (about living in China, a classic!) to "The Soloist" (about a former cello prodigy and a murder trial of a zen student, a totally unique story) He's one of the most interesting writers out there. This book is one of his most entertaining.

I truly love this book. I think it's one of the best books I have read about being a teenager. Mark is as pensive as Salinger's Holden, but this book always makes me laugh, whereas Catcher in the Rye makes me cry. I agree with the reviewer who said that it has mature content, especially about marajuana, but the "musings about sex" are negligable. I would recommend it to anyone 12 or older, as nothing in it would be shocking to most of today's youth. Not only is the book funny, but it also explores more serious issues, such as parent/teenager relationships, ambition, even the meaning of life. I particularly liked the depiction of Mark's father.

My favorite aspect of this book is that the author/narrator is not afraid to laugh at himself.

This is the rare book where you feel plopped down midstream into the progress of a life, and when you are yanked out at the end you feel an overwhelming sense of disappointment because you have almost come to feel as if you are living it yourself. In telling the story of his life from age 13 to 20 or so, Salzman spares none of the gory, embarrassing details of his adolescence, from his fanatical pursuit of Zen-like enlightenment to his growing pot in his mother's house- plants. This is a damn funny book, but in the end you'll be struck by how much it moves you. It's nice for once to read a positive story about a teenager who, while flawed, is basically a decent kid struggling to understand the world around him.