M.C. Easton's Reviews > The Book of Changes

A satisfying read. Covering much the same cultural terrain as Jack Kerouac's classic On the Road, The Book of Changes follows a young narrator's coming-of-age in Berkeley. Yet Jack Remick's take on the cultural revolution humanizes familiar material. Beast, the narrator, starts off eager for initiation into the Berkeley scene: the university, the drugs, the "broads", the art. But unlike Kerouac's protagonist who rides from town to town, indifferent to and unaccountable for the consequences of his choices, Remick gives us a conscientious young man. Beast sticks around long enough to see the aftermath of drug addiction and free love. And the trail of wreckage deeply affects him. As the deaths and broken relationships tally up in his friends' lives, Beast develops a more honest, compassionate perspective than Kerouac's characters ever achieved. A moving tale of one young man's struggle to carve out his own dignity and truth in the midst of radical turbulence.