Younger Than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.82 (734 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0553380486 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 352 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-01-14 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
A parable of culture 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 ci. Rare and wonderful. Jeff, a bold New York teenager, drops a hateful note into a mailbox. The recipient, Ruth, a Southern Belle, decides to respond. What develops from the correspondence is a real-life, extraordinary friendship that lasts for decades. The friendship is documented with actual letters saved over the years by both of the authors of the letters and the book. The journey you travel with Ruth and Jeff through their lives is captivating. The honesty with which Jeff and Ruth share their realities is touching. Sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking and surprisingthis b. "Coming back home" according to Nancy R. Williams. 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
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. 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. 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
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. Sharp, funny, and true, here is a mirror for a generation -- both then and now.. The ringleader, Jeff Durstewitz, impulsively dropped the letter into a mailbox, never suspecting that within a few days he'd receive an electrifying response. 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. In the followin