A GREAT BOOK FOR BOOMERS

I don’t often write about books in my blog. (Unfortunately, the demands of being a full-time writer keep me from reading all the books I’d like to read!) So, when I do recommend one, I think it’s a really good book.

And “Memoirs of a Boomer,” by artist, writer, spiritual-teacher Don Lubov (www.donlubov.com) is just such a book.

Don Lubov is a Baby Boomer who actually did many of the things most Baby Boomers only wished they could do in the sixties and seventies. One of them was about a road trip – complete with backpack and hitch-hiking-thumb – across the country and into Mexico that Lubov took in the early seventies.

Lubov left a good job to pursue his personal journey. And on the road, he runs into a colorful assortment of characters, towns, landscapes, communes, drugs, and situations, some of them hilarious, and some of them dangerous. But all of them interesting.

There were the friends of friends on which he often depended for shelter. And there were the places where he actually stopped for a few months. Such as the communes, filled with hard-working, drug-taking, farming, creative individuals and families who tried very hard to be self-sufficient enough to carve out self-sustaining communities (forty years before the world “sustainable” suddenly became in vogue). There was the eclectic “collective housing” arrangement with a wonderful bunch of characters and fellow artists in the pre-Haight Ashbury days of San Francisco.

There were more characters than you could possibly cast in any Hollywood screenplay. The Dad, Mom, and young-adult son who picked Lubov up, for instance, on a dusty road in the desolate Southwest, and who used their trip as an ongoing beer-fest, popping open and consuming cans of beer as if they were in some sort of race, and then littering the old jalopy (and the road) with beer cans and some questionable substances which could have been anything from human feces to vomit.

There were the situations, such as the mission to Mexico (which, without giving too much away, involved illegal substances) to give two men a phone number; it also involved a payment of $50,000.

There were the modes of transportation. Lubov rode on Mexican buses through dusty, time-stopped-here-a –long-time-ago villages with barking dogs and braying donkeys, while his fellow passengers included a variety of peasants, chickens, dogs, and birds. There were the flat-bed trucks in which he rode in the back, and the eighteen-wheelers in which he rode up front in the cab. There were the old jeeps, the “hippie vans,” the jalopies, the taxis (when there was enough money), the street cars, the trains, the subways.

Then there were the nights he spent camping out alone, often in harsh Western landscapes, never knowing where his next meal or his next dollar were coming from. This is a man who genuinely knew the type of hunger that most of us only read about.

And, by the end of the journey, Don Lubov genuinely knew himself, as well.

To tell you any more would be giving away some of the good stuff. And this book is so filled with good stuff that you should read it for yourself. For anyone who remembers “Leave it to Beaver” or “The Maytag Man” or President John F. Kennedy or “Planet of the Apes” (the one with Charlton Heston!) or Davey Crockett or Mickey Mantle or Twiggy or The Supremes, this is a “must” read…a romp through a time that most Boomers remember very fondly

You can order “Memoirs of a Boomer” at http://www.donlubov.com. And while you’re there, you can also see some of Lubov’s art work and his sustainable architectural designs, and read learn more about the spiritual path about which he teaches and lectures.

Don Lubov is a fascinating guy. And “Memoir of a Boomer” is a fascinating book.

Steve Winston (www.stevewinston.com) has written/contributed to 16 books, and his writing has appeared in major media all over the world. In pursuit of “The Story,” he’s been shot at in Northern Ireland, been a cowboy in Arizona, jumped into an alligator pit in the Everglades, trained with a rebel militia in the jungle, flown World War II fighter planes in aerial “combat,” climbed 15,000-foot mountains, trekked glaciers in Alaska, explored ice caves in Switzerland, and driven an ATV to the top of an 11,000-foot peak in the Rockies, and – even scarier! – back down again, with the wheels hanging over the edge of a cliff with a 3,000-foot drop.