Back in the Day: The Education of an Oklahoma Boy

by Kenneth R Young

BACK IN THE DAY is the memoir of Kenneth R. Young, a distinguished American scholar of Southeast Asia born in Oklahoma at the end of the Great Depression. The book details Young’s early life in small-town Oklahoma and midcentury Los Angeles, continuing through the present day. Young’s mother’s family were “Okies,” poor dirt farmers who barely survived each harvest, while his father worked ten hours a day, six days a week as a grocery clerk, his pay of $12 a week scarcely enough for a family with two young children. Despite unexpectedly becoming a father at age twenty and frequent family difficulties, Young obtained a PhD from New York University in 1970, when he was thirty years old, achieving his lifelong dream. For the next thirty-one years Young taught courses on U.S. diplomacy in East and Southeast Asia at Western Connecticut University. The General’s General, his groundbreaking 1994 biography of Lt. General Arthur MacArthur, Douglas’s father, won several awards and was the basis for a PBS documentary. With BACK IN THE DAY, Young has turned his scholarly eye to an even more familiar his own life.

461 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 2, 2020