Teddy Greenwald and Ray Starck have known one another since the Truman Administration. They, along with two other boys, formed the core of a group of kids who did everything together. As teenagers, they discovered that restaurants gave free coffee refills even if you didn’t order anything else, leading to a lifetime’s worth of bottomless cups and frustrated restaurant owners. Now in advanced age, … age, Teddy and Ray still meet regularly to drink too much coffee and flashback to the various times and events which helped shape their lives.
One of their once-close group, who has enjoyed a modestly successful career in Hollywood, comes up with the idea of making a movie about their youthful experiences together and what came after for each of them. For some, however, facing their past, present, and inevitable future all in one sitting proves considerably more difficult than it appears on the silver screen.
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Great start, stumbled in the middle and total collapse at the end.
Couldn’t finish. I just couldn’t get the plot.
boring
I just couldn’t finish reading this book. I’m sure it would provide a lot of humor. I just couldn’t get into the book.
Premise is good, but it was just a little slow and boring at the beginning and could not compel me to keep reading.
I just loved this book. The two main characters reminded me of my dad but the bottomless cups would be more likely to be bottomless glasses of Guinness at his local pub.
A cute book of nearly 80 years of reminiscing between two guys and their possees, usually over a cup of coffee. Flashbacks contribute well to the story line, characters are nicely delineated, incidents in with humor. A good read.
My apologies to the author – I gave up reading 1/10th through the book. Perhaps it gets better later on, but it was far too much work for me to read this for enjoyment. It may be a difference in cultural background, but the humor just wasn’t humorous to me. And it was obvious the author had worked very hard getting exactly the right wording and phrasing for what he wanted to say in his broad vocabulary, but deciphering what he had said was almost as much work for me. Perhaps I’ll come back to this someday when I run out of other books I haven’t read, but I doubt it.
Great story very humorous and good book on friendship.
I only read a few pages and lost interest.
Hilarious. I like a book that can me laugh out loud. This is both a coming of age and a coming of old age story. Discussions shared by sarcastic septuagenarians who have been friends since the age of 10 alternate with stories about their youthful exploits. As senior citizens, they have “comparative pharmacology exchanges” (boy, have I heard a lot of those. “I’m on more pills than the average ticket holder at Woodstock.”), and experience the vicissitudes of age (“Ray’s internal hydraulics suffered a temporary loss of pressure just then, causing certain mechanical malfunctions Nora could not have missed if she had instead been elsewhere.”) The one who was a widower described his experience going to a senior singles meeting exactly the way my father did after my mother passed: “When I got there, the male population immediately increased to a total of one. I was it for about twenty minutes, during which time the thirty or so ‘ladies’ –which term I use only politely –were milling around the perimeter in little groups sizing me up while pretending I didn’t exist at the same time.” The descriptions of their youth were great: “Whoever originally came up with the idea of going away to college was an unqualified genius. It was, as Ray described it, how a dog must feel after slipping the leash and making a clean getaway.” I like the author’s use of language; e.g., showing a lot of backbone is showing a “cavernous ossuary’s worth of vertebrae.”
At any rate, the one of their group who went to Hollywood and became a director/producer decided to base a movie on their lives, with young people playing them as teens, and them playing themselves in old age. “Watching it had been an experience akin to seeing one’s life pass before their eyes, in an end-of-the-road kind of way.” Poignant. Especially if one of your old gang has passed away, but there he is, adventuring with you as a youth once again. I was sorry when the book ended.
I REALLY ENJOYED IT
The reader learns about these characters as they recall their earlier lives. Most of us that are in that “older’ age range can relate to much of the way these characters think and act. Younger readers will get to see how age changes us and how they will reflect on their own lives as they age.
This is a story of two old friends. By the end of the book I wanted to sit down and have a cup of coffee with them.