| Summary: | An iconic book about American youth and friendship between young men. Everyone has had a friendship like the one Rich Cohen immortalizes inLake Effect: a friendship that defined you at a critical time, that gave you courage, that transported you from adolescence into the beginnings of adulthood. With hilarity and disarming tenderness, Cohen chronicles a golden moment and the bittersweet legacy it left behind. Cohen grew up on the North Shore of Chicago, in Glencoe, Illinois, "the perfect town for a certain kind of dreamy kid, with just enough history to get your arms around." In the summer, he and his friends slept on the beach: Tom Pistone, who drove a '61 Pontiac GTO, walked with a swagger, and dated girls in polka dots; Ronnie Flowers, gullible and earnest, always the butt of someone's joke; and Jamie Drew. Jamie had moved to Glencoe from a working-class town west of the city, and he had been raised without a father. Cohen was from the affluent part of town known as the Bluffs; his own father was the dominant figure in his life. The two boys became inseparable. Jamie "was what, for years, looking in a mirror, I had hoped to see looking back at me." Lake Effectis about growing up on the Great Lakes, emerging from the shadow of a father, falling under the spell of an unforgettable friendship, and the pain of looking back on that friendship with adult eyes. What happens to the self of childhood? Can a person vanish so cleanly into adult life? In a memoir that stretches from the shores of Lake Michigan to the streets of the French Quarter to the hallowed halls of the oldNew Yorker, Rich Cohen captures the humble dreams--of kissing girls, getting drunk for the first time, driving to a jazz club in "the city" in a borrowed car, seeing the Cubs finally win from the cheap seats at Wrigley Field on a summer day--that fueled an epic bond between two young men. Writing at the height of his powers, with impeccable comic timing and a gift for the perfect anecdote, the indelible turn of phrase, Rich Cohen captures the grandeur and sorrow and sweetness of youth.
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