Book Summary and Reviews of Young Man, Muddled by Robert Kanigel

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JanineS

Reflections on Youth.
I received this book in order to participate and in a BookBrowse discussion. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this coming-of-age memoir and was thrown off by the cover (which was later explained through reading the book) but found once I began reading that this was a rare opportunity for me to re-examine and re-experience a period in time that I too had lived through. I enjoyed the author’s reflections of his youth, it’s innocence; his gleeful indulgences upon achieving “freedom” and his sobering moment upon viewing Wild Strawberries wondering on the life he had chosen at this point in his youth. I got swept up on how he viewed and/or pursued those things that came his way and the choices that came along with all of them. But what made the book so meaningful to me was that the author put into perspective an important point in aging: we can’t turn back the clock so it’s best to reflect and appreciate your choices, regret the hurts you received or inflicted, but be grateful for all that has been given. A most enjoyable read.

David Christ

Author's Experiences
I'm also interested in the author's experiences with the underground newspaper and how they affected his career. Overall, it appears to be a book about personal growth, love, and pursuing one's passions.

william desmond

young man muddled
This a personal account: a life story, a memoir, a tale told through the eyes of one that rode into the world with his toes curled over the leading edge of the Babyboomer’s Generation. The story opens in Baltimore in 1966 some twenty years after his birth. We join him on his many travels and adventures throughout life, a life that granted him the fodder to peruse and accomplish a career as a renowned writer. There is love and lost love, education and ambition, happiness and loneliness, dreams and despair, religion and discovery, work and writing. But there is also the counter culture—hippies, protests, drugs, racial unrest, sex and the sexual revolution, the military draft and the Viet Nam War. His story is inimitable but it is also a story of his generation—so may tales to be had from this time—his—is just one of them.

Susan P

Muddled Young Man; Muddled Times
It's the 1960s and there's a lot of social turmoil and a lot of pressure to be so many things while being so young! This is a journal or diary kept by this man growing up in the 1960s.He goes to college and becomes an engineer; becomes engaged and breaks it off; accepts a job with the military complex but actively avoids the draft and the Vietnam War; goes to anti war protests marches, chases an independent young woman to France and back as they carry out their passionate affair. He quits he work as an engineer and begins to write for an underground newspaper. And, that's the story; he falls into the writing professional not because he had direction or certain dreams of writing but because he could write and did and because it didn't fit into the parental expectations he grew up with. Ho hum, the book, in my opinion, is a mediocre offering and a somewhat boring read as it tells the tale of many young men growing up in the 60s. Most of were "muddled" about our ambitions or lack thereof; some 'fell' into success and others faded into the sunset. I suspect it's not so different from young people growing up today. Sometimes one is just lucky!

Kassapa

Muddled, for sure
Rabert Kanigel's memoir is more a diary than a memoir about a few years in the late 1960's. His audience seems to be himself, remembering times past without much reflection; it covers jobs he took to avoid the draft for fighting in Viet Nam while working for companies involved in producing military equipment. The book follows his trying to make a relationship with his girlfriend Maura work and his trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, occupationally.

It's a very self-centered book. Hey, I get that it's a memoir, but without reflection, the broader contexts of what was happening in the world and his own personal journey just seem to flatline.

Kassapa

Muddled, for sure
I want to say one further thing about this book. It was very poorly written. It was an "I did this and this and this etc." without any literate flourishes of language.

After finishing the book, whew, I open the new novel, Complicities, by Stacey D'Erasmo, and in the first paragraph, it was like water to a man dying for something well written.

Other books by Robert Kanigel at BookBrowse