I just finished reading Benjamin Taylor's new(er) book, HERE WE ARE: MY FRIENDSHIP WITH PHILIP ROTH, and enjoyed it immensely, partly because I've been a Philip Roth fan for over fifty years, but mostly because it's a damn good book, and Taylor is a damn good writer. But this one is even better.

THE HUE AND CRY AT OUR HOUSE: A YEAR REMEMBERED, is Taylor's memoir - a very short, concise and beautifully written memoir. The year he is remembering begins with the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Just a few short hours before that, eleven year-old Ben Taylor had shaken the President's had during a brief stop at a hotel in Fort Worth. But, although the year that follows does take center stage, we also get a compressed look at Taylor's early life, as he describes himself -

"A repellently good boy, like most of my kind, Jewish and going-to-be-homosexual ... A tiptoe walker, a hand-flapper, a ninny under pressure and a shrieker when frightened or angry. A mortification. The diagnostic name later attached to my symptoms was not yet in use. I was just 'troubled' and not what my parents had bargained for."

Ben saw his first psychiatrist at six - "a waste of time and money. What I was, I remained." With a plethora of odd habits and OCD symptoms, he was also mystified by the art of conversation. "How did people know what to say?" He was, in a nutshell - "a boy with asthma, homosexuality and what would later be called Asperger syndrome." As he grew older, he studied other people and copied them, "and built myself a Frankenstein monster from the parts I liked best about them."

So yeah, an odd duck, but looking back at his younger self, his descriptions are funny as hell, and yet you feel for the kid, ya know? Another 'and yet' - he remembers his childhood as pretty normal, particularly in comparison to other memoirs he has since read, from people like Mary McCarthy, Kathryn Harrison, Mary Karr, Lucy Grealy and David Small (I already KNOW all these stories; you can look 'em up if you don't - all pretty grim).

"We lived without any of the curses: no madness, violence, bankruptcy, drug-taking, drunkenness, incest or desertion."

Taylor's method of using JFK's assassination as a starting point is a smart one. Almost everyone who was old enough can remember exactly where he was and what he was doing when he heard of this. I'm eight years older than Taylor. I was in the Army at the time, stationed at a tiny outpost in northern Turkey. I was at a midnight movie, watching a Disney film, MOON PILOT, when the projectionist stopped the film and came up front and told us the president had been shot in Dallas. The U.S. Military all across the globe was put on immediate heightened alert status. We were issued our rifles and field gear and told to stand by in our barracks. It was tense, yes. But what made it a bit strange - funny, even - was that there was no ammo for our weapons. And we joked about this. You see? All these years later, I remember small details like this. And I suspect any and all of Taylor's readers would be able to do the same. So yeah, a clever device. He also works popular films and plays of the time into his narrative, the Beatles' first appearance on Ed Sullivan, for example. The early days of Motown and the sudden appearance of black music in mainstream pop. He remembers hearing the camp counselors one night talking of LBJ and his speech about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to the escalation of the American presence in Vietnam. (I remembered that too, and where I was - still in the Army, en route from Turkey to Germany.)

And he talks of one of his dear friends, Robby Anton, a very talented artist and puppeteer, who years later would be an early victim of AIDS. He remembers going to summer camp in Wisconsin, where he develops a crush on another boy. Moving from sixth grade into junior high, he experiences bigotry and the special kind of cruelty and exclusion that prepubescent kids are so good at.

There are stories here too about his family, about how he hero-worshiped his brother Tommy, ten years older and his only sibling. It was a loving family, with plenty of music, books, and laughter. His father was, for the most part, a secular Jew, who only went to Synagogue on special occasions. Ben tells how his father didn't always abide by the maxim to never speak ill of the dead. After a funeral, he remembers his father commenting, "Rabbi's eulogy made me want to open the box and see who was in there." (I'm still chuckling.) He tells too of his parents' courtship and all he has heard about their early years. His father served in the Navy during the Second World War. He tells of his Jewish ancestors who escaped the pogroms in Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, and how they ended up in Texas.

I better quit. I mean, this is a book of less than two hundred pages. How the hell did he get so much in there? And all of it stuff I could remember or relate to. I could especially relate to Taylor's life-long love affair with books and reading, to all of his references to the greats, books he read as a kid, and later in life. (He's a Ph.D. and Professor of Writing now. He studied under LIONEL TRILLING, fer cripesake!) He talks of Henry James, Hemingway, Twain, Faulkner, Salinger, Golding, Harper Lee, Cather and more. He was especially taken by Thornton Wilder - OUR TOWN and THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, noting "Literature, starting with THE BRIDGE, existed to convince me that other people were as real as I was."

Finally, here's what Taylor says about why he is writing all this down -

"I am trying to say what it has felt like to be me, this unrepeatable alloy of temperament and circumstance, this particle of history. What I tell is over half a century old, but everything is still happening and the past is now. I heap up this monument because my family - Annette, Sol [his parents], Tommy, Robby too - have vanished and I cannot allow oblivion to own them altogether."

Yes. He is "saving" his family, his friends, his own story from oblivion. And he has done it so very eloquently. I loved this book. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

The author is present reminiscing about his 11th and 12 years, with forays earlier and later. The events and emotions are presented both as they were then and as viewed from adulthood. ( )

It never happened before. I don't ever recall picking up a book and devouring it cover-to-cover in one weekend. But it happened With Benjamin Taylor's astonishing autobiography that traces one year in the life of a special boy. This riveting tale introduces us to an 11-year-old Forth Worth, Texas boy who shook the hand of JFK only hours before the assassination. For the next 180 pages, this slim volume skillfully transports readers back to 1963 as we experience the politics, the turbulence and even the music of a monumental era. Throughout this all-too-brief journey, we watch in awe as a child struggles to understand who he is. We watch as he navigates complicated relationships. Some passages are so brilliantly written that I found myself reading them three or four times. I rarely assign 5 stars to a book, as evidenced by my reviews on LibraryThing. But to give Taylor's splendid work anything less would be a grave injustice. I have no doubt I'll be reading this tome again in the not-too-distant future. ( )