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Overview
A New York Times Notable BookWinner of the Great Lakes Book Award and the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library
Raised in an affluent suburb on the North Shore of Chicago, Rich Cohen had a cluster of interesting friends, but none more interesting than Jamie Drew. Fatherless, reckless, and lower middle class in a place that wasn’t, Jamie possessed such an irresistible insouciance and charm that even the teachers called him Drew-licious. Through the high school years of parties and Cub games and girls, of summer nights on the beach and forbidden forays into the blues bars of Chicago’s notorious South Side, the two formed an inseparable bond. Even after Cohen went to college in New Orleans (Jamie went to Kansas) and then moved to New York, where he had a memorable interlude with the legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, Jamie remained oddly crucial to his life. Exquisite and taut, Lake Effect is a bittersweet coming-of-age story that quietly bores to the essence of friendship and how it survives even as it is destined to change.
Synopsis
A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Great Lakes Book Award and the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library
Raised in an affluent suburb on the North Shore of Chicago, Rich Cohen had a cluster of interesting friends, but none more interesting than Jamie Drew. Fatherless, reckless, and lower middle class in a place that wasn’t, Jamie possessed such an irresistible insouciance and charm that even the teachers called him Drew-licious. Through the high school years of parties and Cub games and girls, of summer nights on the beach and forbidden forays into the blues bars of Chicago’s notorious South Side, the two formed an inseparable bond. Even after Cohen went to college in New Orleans (Jamie went to Kansas) and then moved to New York, where he had a memorable interlude with the legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, Jamie remained oddly crucial to his life. Exquisite and taut, Lake Effect is a bittersweet coming-of-age story that quietly bores to the essence of friendship and how it survives even as it is destined to change.
Publishers Weekly
When Cohen's family lived in Libertyville, Ill., they were the only Jews in the town, but that was fine with their neighbors, who said, "Thank God, we were afraid they would sell to Catholics." This anecdote illuminates the ever-shifting status of outsiderness that Cohen portrayed with such precision in Tough Jews. It's also emblematic of this memoir of his youth. Cohen is less interested in cultural identity than in pinpointing the elliptical influences of the mid-1980s ("that decade, as odorless and colorless as noxious gas, came to inhabit every part of our lives") on him and his friends. Much of the memoir is a platonic love letter to his best friend, Jamie Drew, "the true hero of my youth, the most vivid presence." Cohen's prose is elegiac, nostalgic and Gatsby-esque double dates are remembered by "cheeseburgers and apple-pie... a root-beer float, a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting into its own foam... and in the rearview, Jamie whispered to his girl as the split-levels and convenience stores tumbled by" and conveys not only the fleetingness of teen years but a vivid portrait of Midwestern life. Cohen's memoir is filled with tender moments (e.g., Jamie telling him "he had a wet dream, which he called a rain dance... [which] is brought by the rain god, the sweetest and most charitable god of all"), but never loses its realistic, hard edge, such as when Jamie decides to drive while drunk and high, crying because his own father died in a drunk driving accident. Poignant and lyrical, this will please Cohen's fans and find new readers for him. Agent, Andrew Wylie. (Apr. 29) Forecast: Knopf plans a 50,000 first printing, and given this book's wide appeal (20- and 30-somethings who grew up in the '80s, Jewish readers, Midwestern transplants, New Yorker fans), there's a good chance it will indeed live up to the publisher's expectations. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Rich Cohen decribes this book as being "about my early years on the shores of Lake Michigan, about my struggles with neighborhood bullies, about heeding the lessons of the school yard, about trying to look cool, about losing it all on the forced march to adulthood." The forced march to adulthood has seldom seemed as smartly cadenced as it does in this gritty and glorious memoir.Publishers Weekly
When Cohen's family lived in Libertyville, Ill., they were the only Jews in the town, but that was fine with their neighbors, who said, "Thank God, we were afraid they would sell to Catholics." This anecdote illuminates the ever-shifting status of outsiderness that Cohen portrayed with such precision in Tough Jews. It's also emblematic of this memoir of his youth. Cohen is less interested in cultural identity than in pinpointing the elliptical influences of the mid-1980s ("that decade, as odorless and colorless as noxious gas, came to inhabit every part of our lives") on him and his friends. Much of the memoir is a platonic love letter to his best friend, Jamie Drew, "the true hero of my youth, the most vivid presence." Cohen's prose is elegiac, nostalgic and Gatsby-esque double dates are remembered by "cheeseburgers and apple-pie... a root-beer float, a scoop of vanilla ice cream melting into its own foam... and in the rearview, Jamie whispered to his girl as the split-levels and convenience stores tumbled by" and conveys not only the fleetingness of teen years but a vivid portrait of Midwestern life. Cohen's memoir is filled with tender moments (e.g., Jamie telling him "he had a wet dream, which he called a rain dance... [which] is brought by the rain god, the sweetest and most charitable god of all"), but never loses its realistic, hard edge, such as when Jamie decides to drive while drunk and high, crying because his own father died in a drunk driving accident. Poignant and lyrical, this will please Cohen's fans and find new readers for him. Agent, Andrew Wylie. (Apr. 29) Forecast: Knopf plans a 50,000 first printing, and given this book's wide appeal (20- and 30-somethings who grew up in the '80s, Jewish readers, Midwestern transplants, New Yorker fans), there's a good chance it will indeed live up to the publisher's expectations. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.KLIATT
The decade of the '80s is still so recent that there are not many memoirs yet written about it. For Rich Cohen, the '80s was his coming-of-age decade and Glencoe on the North Shore of Chicago his fledging perch. In this story of his high school and college years, Cohen populates his world with his friends, parents and teachers and, especially, his best friend, Jamie Drew, known by all as Drew-licious. Drew was the boy with the most charm and promise and whose family (minus his father) had the least money in the affluent world of Glencoe. As the friends disperse to colleges around the country, Jamie becomes sidetracked and some of his carefully hidden secrets are revealed. The author's bittersweet recounting of his youth and his friendships is more than a personal story, although the rites of passage of his high school years and graduation are told with affection for the participants. Cohen, an author, writer for the New Yorker, and a contributing editor of Rolling Stone, captures the spirit of a specific time and place, but he also conveys the tenderness of youth on the brink of promise fulfilled and dissipated. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Random House, Vintage, 208p.,— Nola Theiss