Younger Than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties [Paperback]

Jeff Durstewitz (Author), Ruth Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2001

An unforgettable dual memoir that explores an extraordinary friendship ... and illuminates a generation.

It began in 1969, when a group of bored Long Island high school reporters wrote, for a lark, an obnoxious note to Ruth Tuttle, the editor of a school paper in small-town Mississippi. The ringleader, Jeff Durstewitz, impulsively dropped the letter into a mailbox, never suspecting that within a few days he'd receive an electrifying response. In the following flurry of letters, genteelly Southern Ruth and brash New Yorker Jeff explored their feelings about God, race, sex, and life -- and an enduring friendship was begun.

Over the next thirty years, this long-distance bond sustained Ruth and Jeff through love affairs and heartbreak, social change and disillusionment, divorce and the loss of a cherished friend. As their letters chart their passage from youth to middle age, their memoir captures not just the hopes of an era yearning for revolution and the soul of a country on the brink of change, but also the essence of being bright, young, and passionate. Sharp, funny, and true, here is a mirror for a generation -- both then and now.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 1969, when 17-year-old Jeff Durstewitz and some friends wrote a smart-alecky letter to Ruth Tuttle (now Williams), these suburban New York kids assumed she must be "some sort of prototype Southern-belle-racist" because she edited a Mississippi high school newspaper. What they got back was a smart, gracious reply from a nascent rebel desperate for companionship beyond the restrictive confines of Yazoo City. Jeff wrote back apologetically, and an intense relationship was born. The pair found after Jeff's awkward first visit to Mississippi that they weren't destined to be lovers, but nevertheless the friendship endured. Their early letters, surprisingly mature and touchingly vulnerable, remind us how late the '60s started in the South, where Ruth struggled to express more enlightened racial attitudes and protest the Vietnam War without alienating her conservative parents. Jeff's experiences are more conventionally countercultural, right down to the fact that his high school buddies Ben and Jerry grew up to be the famed ice cream moguls. Yet both Jeff and Ruth's lives follow the pattern of many of their generation, beginning with radical politics and grungy communal living and ending in a tentative return to the mainstream and middle-aged settling down. Their correspondence, supplemented by the authors' present-day recollections, evokes with pleasing specificity an era that seems at once very recent and amazingly long ago. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

A rueful, sometimes funny look back at the dreams and excesses of the '60s counterculture, this dual memoir records a friendship that began in 1969, when Durstewitz, a hip high school senior from Long Island, N.Y., met Ruth Tuttle, a conservative Southern girl from Yazoo City, Miss. On a lark, he and his school chums wrote her a mock-indignant letter trashing the Deep South and the school paper she edited. When she unexpectedly replied, Jeff and two pals drove to Yazoo to meet her, sparking a Yankee/Dixie friendship that helped steer both of them through later affairs, marriages, crises and breakups. Rebelling against her parents, Ruth rushed into an unhappy first marriage with an LSD-popping, socialist anthropology major, which led to her nine-month stint as an organizer for the extremist National Caucus of Labor Committees. Jeff, an anti-Vietnam War activist, played in a rock band and smoked pot in the college president's office during a sit-in. Both later became entrepreneurs: she started an advertising agency, while Jeff spent several years running a Ben & Jerry franchise after rooming with the ice cream company's founders. Told in alternating voices and supplemented with correspondence, this memoir aims to relate an emblematic '60s coming of age story, but after the rush of the authors' first meeting, the story grows plodding, lacking the irony or hindsight that could have made it memorable. Still, many readers will identify with the descriptions of the era and the emotional roller-coaster that marked the authors' transition to adulthood, with all its compromises.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553380486
• ISBN-13: 978-0553380484
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #415,977 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book worthy of a generation, July 7, 2000

By 

Campbell Armstrong (Dublin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Younger Than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Coming back home, June 19, 2000

By 

Nancy R. Williams - See all my reviews

This review is from: Younger Than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Memoir, May 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Younger Than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties (Paperback)

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.