Reviews

THE ME GENERATION...by Me  (GROWING UP IN THE ‘60s

PRAISE FOR Ken Levine’S  The Me Generation...by Me-Growing Up in the '60s
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 I Forgot How Funny The 60s Were
If you read The Me Generation…By Me: Growing Up In The ‘60s, and believe author Ken Levine, the 1960s was one hilarious decade...the percentage of laugh-out-loud moments is pretty damn high, thus making Levine’s memoir a true laugh riot.
Music is peripheral here but the grooves get deep when he takes on a job at a record store, the kind of store with private listening booths so you could hear the music before you buy it. The one rule was no pot smoking in the booths but there was this one musician—from Buffalo Springfield—who constantly broke the rule. It was Neil Young and Levine says, “he was a shithead. I used to throw him out once a week. Plus, he slept and dumped a girl I had a crush on so I took every opportunity to kick his raggedy ass to the curb.” Now that’s funny!
[H]e didn’t go to Woodstock and I did. Then again, he got “a mere inches away…standing eye-to-eye” with Goldie Hawn’s vagina, so I guess he wins.
Ken Levine is one funny guy. He proves it by playing the ‘60s for laughs. Why the hell not? Surely, enough serious stuff has been written about that decade.
Mike Greenblatt The Aquarian Weekly (Click to read the entire review)
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Levine was one funny kid, no matter if all he was doing was daydreaming lustful thoughts about his mother's friends. In fact, more than half the book tells of the romantic efforts of a boy trying to figure out how to become a man. Without spoiling the story, it's safe to assume he finally gets there.
Whether it's family trips to San Francisco, high school nerdathons or just plain old boyhood jobs, the writer has an eye for the bullseye, and always hits it. Who else could make cruising the streets of suburbia become this funny, or describe in endless detail his dating life (such as it was) and turn that into high drama? It's called humor, and no wonder Levine went on to write for TV shows like Cheers and even script a movie or two. From the start, he makes even the simplest delight a childhood highlight.
If Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show often seemed like phony baloney Hollywood malarkey, read The Me Generation...By Me immediately. The boy made it through, and lived to write about it and make us laugh.
Bill Bentley The Morton Report
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The Me Generation...By Me is a fun loving autobiography of growing up in the 60s.

Levine presents his unique view as an outsider (he was not really about joining cliques in school) of events like the meteoric rise of The Beatles, The Batman TV show, being a contestant on The Dating Game (which he was) and his experiences working in an LA record store and his visit to the set of Rowan And Martin's Laugh-In. Levine's writing style that helped make shows like Frasier, Mash, and Cheers popular, make this book a very entertaining read.

Mike Barer
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This is a thoroughly enjoyable memoir by truly funny writer.

Ken Levine is an Emmy-winning screenwriter (MASH, Cheers, Frazier and several others), so when he sits down and writes a memoir about a self-described tall, geeky, eyeglass-wearing, upper middle class Jewish kid from the San Fernando Valley stumbling his way through high school and college during the 60s, his take on that time -- and the trials of growing up -- is simply funny.

Levine writes a deftly funny sentence and yet his feet remain solidly on the ground, and I never got the sense he was engaging in even a little chest beating.

It's not a history of the 60s, but a history of one funny guy's journey through it and his contact with some of its icons (he was on The Dating Game, went to school with Ann Jillian and Jan Smithers, took dating advice from Zsa Zsa Gabor, etc).

Great summer reading, especially if you lived through the 60s.

Tom Chandler GoodReads

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An excellent and highly entertaining read. It was great to see how much the memories of someone in the US coincided with my own in New Zealand. The world was very much more of a single unit back then. Levine writes with a slightly caustic wit that suits his recollections beautifully and makes the book very funny. In the best possible way I felt his embarrassment and identified with his hopes and aspirations. The sixties? I remember the decade so well - and despite popular opinion to the contrary I WAS there. Read this book - it'll make you laugh and give you a pang or two of melancholy as well.
 M. Alan Wheatley

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You don’t need to have grown up on the West Coast to recognize most of the cultural references in The Me Generation...by Me. But readers who also remember what life was like back in the day will be the ones who most enjoy the jokes and perhaps will want to compare their own mental notes with Levine’s. This isn’t a book to read for the story it tells but rather for how it’s told. Remember—this guy grew up to become one of the most seasoned comic writers in television.
Dr. Wesley Britton BookPleasures.com

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From watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan to working part-time jobs to the moon landing to hippies, to Vietnam protests and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy, it's all here, from the standpoint of a kid who was a little involved with everything but not totally engulfed by anything.
He knows how to write in a way that is both funny and touching, and when the subject is serious, he knows how to capture that, too. But Levine also captures the dilemma of...the many day-to-day dramas that kids have dealt with from the dawn of time, probably, and will be dealing with far into the future.
I highly recommend The Me Generation...By Me to anyone who was a kid in the '60s and anyone who is interested in a realistic, funny story of what it was like in that decade if you weren't the hippie living in the street or the soldier in Vietnam.
Rhetta Akamatsu Blogcritics