It's really a Dud, man.

I mean "Expecting to Fly" a "sixties recogning" by Martha Tod Dudman. It is another one of those tell-all, coming of age book by a bright young woman, who talks about her adolescent experience with drugs and sex.

I had two reasons to read this one. First, because Dudman grew up in Washington DC (in fact in Cleveland Park), and I was interested in what life was like for teenagers here in the 1960s. Secondly, because her father was the Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, whose articles I read growing up, and about whom I was interested to read (from his daughter's vantage point).

Well, it was not much about Richard Dudman (although it brought back memories about his being captured in Cambodia during the war), and not at all about St. Louis, which did not seem to be in Martha's consciousness. And, I guess there is some redeeming social value to the book, as she left her wasted adolescence behind and apparently became a normal wife/mother in Maine (although the book ends the summer after her first year at college). What you did see was that she began to realize that things had to change during her college years, and you could see how these new feelings began to overtake the old, giving her promise of escaping from what was most likely the deadest of dead end lives.

But was the book necessary? Probably not. And what will her children and grandchildren think when they read it?

Oh, well.