You were born the year rock and roll arrived. This year you turn seventy. This is not a history book. It is a book of recognition - written to make you say, out loud and more than once, "I had completely forgotten about that." It walks through the world you actually grew up in: the house with one telephone bolted to the kitchen wall, the smell of a freshly mimeographed worksheet, the streetlight that meant it was time to come home, the transistor radio under your pillow with the volume down so low only you could hear it. WHAT'S INSIDE - The America of 1956, described the way it felt rather than the way it is summarized - The house you grew up in, room by room, down to the sounds it made at night - School in the early sixties: ink, cursive, duck-and-cover drills, milk money, and the teacher everyone remembers - Three channels, a test pattern, and the shows you ran home for - Being outside until dark, and the freedom nobody supervised - What was in the refrigerator, what was on the Sunday table, and the candy you could buy with a nickel - The decade turning serious while you were still in grade school, told honestly and without taking sides - Records, the DJ, the British invasion arriving when you were about eight, and the first single you bought with your own money - High school in the seventies, the first car, and what a driver's license meant before phones - Forty questions your children and grandchildren could ask you, and a long list of things that are simply gone PERFECT FOR Anyone born in 1956 - and anyone shopping for a seventieth birthday who wants to give something better than a novelty gift. It reads well alone and even better out loud, passed around a table. Some of it you will remember instantly. Some of it will take a moment. And a few pages in, you will start telling someone a story you have not thought about in fifty years.
