Sleepwalk: California Dreamin' and a Last Dance with the '60s

by Christopher Buckley

For Christopher Buckley, the West is more than just a direction: it stands for dreams and possibilities that are supple, color-filled, and bittersweet. Tinged with memories both comic and dark, this is a book about what it meant to grow up in California during the late '50s and early '60s, one written from the viewpoint of a spirited and insightful observer capable of deftly weaving tales about Catholic school, fashion, cars, music, and dances in the high school gym together with smooth-flowing personal reflections on poetry, politics, and life's many ironies. With uncanny accuracy, Buckley's essays show us how childhood follows us into adulthood, how the culture of our birth sustains, directs, and sometimes blinds us. Haunting in its observations, Sleepwalk is also vastly entertaining and, for anyone not familiar with the ethos of the period, terrifically informative.

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2006

About the author

Christopher Buckley is a poet. For 2007-2008 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry at the University of California Riverside.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Jeff Streeby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having grown up in the same era as CB, I was in sympathy (mostly)with his perspectives on the age. This collection of cnf essays/memoir is readable, friendly, funny, bittersweet. Among my favorites is "Fame and Fortune or, I am not Christopher Buckley" in which Buckley (an award-winning poet and teacher at the University of California, Riverside) explores the confusion among readers that mistakes his identity for the OTHER Christopher Buckley, a different popular author f the same name, who is the son of William F. Buckley, the highly conservative writer and thinker.

Interested in the '60's? Good source for a sense of the motives of the counter-culture. This suggests the tone for his more recent prose poetry collection Modern History.