9Lewis H. Carlson was born and raised in Muskegon, Michigan, the only child of a Jewish father and a Scandinavian mother. It was the depth of the Great Depression, there was no work, and so-called "mixed" marriages meant additional pressures on a young couple unable to survive the hard times.

After the marriage ended in divorce, the young boy lived with his grandparents while his mother returned to college to get her teaching degree. Following an insecure childhood, he became an indifferent student, a frustrated pursuer of the fairer sex, and a military misfit before eventually achieving reasonable competence as a fly-fisherman, a lover of animals, and a gently radical professor of history. He also found a lovely Swedish girl to be his lifetime companion.

He offers this sage advice in the introduction to his memoir: "Listen to your inner voices, which are very different than what passes for truth in our mass-mediated, myth-laden, materialistic society. Be nostalgic about the future because it belongs to you, and not to those who demand that you live in a mythical past they themselves created."

This is his story, told with the humor he employs to stumble across the hurdles of life.