In this Boomer memoir, Driving Miss Daisy meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. With lilting eloquence, Summer Brenner captures the tumultuous fifties and sixties of a genteel Jewish family in Atlanta, with the South’s oppressive segregation and anti-Semitism.

The family drama is fraught: the brother is a schizophrenic, the mother a Gucci-clad Medusa, and the father a suicide. After extensive travels, Brenner frees herself in the Bay Area to become “more beatnik than debutante.

” Framed by historic events, this is the moving coming-of-age story of a generation. James Nolan, author of Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy (2018 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Memoir)My life has been just a little bit enlightened by meeting David, Summer Brenner’s brother and the ultimate subject of this poignant memoir.

Through her words I feel that I’ve come to know the man, his idiosyncrasies, his charm, his knack for breaking an awkward silence with sudden bursts of song. When the book was finished I felt as if I’d lost someone close, someone I used to know as a child, reintroduced in his dying days.

In learning to know David, I feel like I know a little bit more about Summer, too. Her story is a great tribute, though sometimes harsh as honesty often is, to her father, mother, brother and the people she came to meet in a life centered in the beating heart of a bygone era.

Stephen Jay Schwartz, Los Angeles Times bestselling author of Boulevard and Beat. .