Reviewed by John C. Krieg
The Book of Happiness: A Memoir:
That Time in America When I Thought Everything Could Only Get Better
by Joseph Mark Glazner
Paperback, 372 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1739027131
I remember a time in America when I also thought that anything was possible, and that the future could only get better. The pursuit of happiness, so eloquently claimed by Thomas Jefferson in America’s Declaration of Independence (1776) as our birthright as citizens of this great country, is something that many somehow inexplicitly lose along the way. So, I appreciate Joseph Mark Glazner’s brilliantly written memoir that takes me back to that magical time.
Glazner was born in February of 1945 and identifies as a “war baby,” even though he quite literally sits on the cusp of the baby boomer generation which I personally belong to by being born in June of 1951. While many accounts of the 1950’s portray them as one of America’s most repressive decades, those of us who were children during that period were having too much fun to ever feel that way. Happy kids remember deeper into their childhood than less fortunate children, and Glazner gives us snippets of his life going as far back as age two. It helps their cause when a memoirist has a good memory, and the authors appears to be nearly photographic.
Initially prosperous and living at the limit of their means in Plainfield, New Jersey, his father’s glove manufacturing business was under constant threat from foreign competition which prompted several factory relocations and other cost cutting measures while forcing a family move to a smaller less expensive home in Warrenville, New Jersey. Not everything about the move was bad:
As depressing as the rubble-filled lots were, the view from the back of the house and beyond the lots were redeeming. Behind the house was a large tree and plant nursery with stands of different kinds of hardwoods and evergreen trees in the distance. Directly behind the house were beautiful fields of azaleas and rhododendrons. The plants were just beginning to bloom when they arrived. Beyond the development for a half mile up the sides of the valley and along the valley floor, they could see a scattering of farms, fields, woods, and a few homes in the distance (p. 29).
Country living, in other words, and Glazner grew up to become an outdoorsman in those woods, so much so that he became an Eagle Boy Scout at an early age. But not all of his youth was idyllic:
By four, it was also obvious to me that I was doomed to be a short and inconsequential weakling. I would never master the outdoors and physical activities like my brother. Besides my allergy to bees, which made me more cautious than normal kids about every step I took, my ankles were weak, so I fell and tripped if I didn’t pay attention. My wrists and arms were too weak to pull myself up into a tree or catch a ball of any kind. Even when playing with the few kids in my neighborhood my age, I was the most likely to get caught first at tag and the first to strike out or have a ball land on my head or in my face instead of my mitt or hands. I had to be more cautious, more aware of my surroundings, more reliant on my wits, funnier, and talkative in any dangerous situation where other kids were trying to prove their dominance (p.69).
Boys will be boys, in other words, and some boys simply grow up faster than others. Joseph Mark Glazner was merely a late bloomer who blossomed during his freshman year in high school. He joined the wrestling team, lost significant weight, and grew by six inches to a respectable 5’-8” tall. Now, the problem was not attracting girls, but choosing the right one.
The antisemitism and fanatical hatred that cataclysmically boiled to the surface when the Nazis rose to power and initiated the carnage of World War II was particularly hard for the Jewish Glazner family to fathom. Glazner’s father, then in his mid-thirties, was in the reserves. His uncle Sam was in the European theatre and became a German prisoner of war. He had vivid memories of inhumane treatment. But, in reality, there was no shortage of antisemitism back home in America if they cared to notice it. They didn’t, and for the most part chose to rise above it. Glazner’s father employed many blacks in his glove factory at fair market wages, and the family took notice of several precursors to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s; specifically the murder of Emmitt Till during the freedom rider campaign in August of 1955, and Rosa Park’s stand in Montgomery, Alabama leading to the Montgomery bus boycott in December of that year. Both had a propound impact on ten-year-old Joe, and contributed mightily to the meteoric rise of civil rights leader Dr. Matrim Luther King.
In September of 1956 “Elvis the Pelvis Presley” sent shock waves through the parental units of America with his electrifying performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The Glazner’s by then had their first television set and were firmly implanted in America’s middle class, but hardship would strike again when Joe’s father contacted Parkinson’s disease and began to rapidly deteriorate in similar fashion to his beleaguered glove business.
Life goes on, and young Joe had problems of his own and a challenge of epic proportions. In high school he had discovered the immense pleasure he experienced in creative writing, and was distressed to learn that he was deemed a slow reader through his school’s and SAT testing. He soldiered on tenaciously when it was discovered that he was dyslexic and rose his reading level to the point where he earned a scholastic scholarship to the University of Southern California in 1963 where the memoir ends, but not without the right-of-passage into his first sexual encounter where he loses his virginity and gains the actual title of this book when parting from her:
When I told her I wasn’t sure what I would write about, she said, “Write about happiness. There’s far too much trouble in this world already without adding to it.”
“The Book of Happiness,” I said, and it made her laugh. Hearing her laugh made me feel good. I was happy but sad, too, because our time together was ending (p.353).
At its core this is a book about the entirely human path to responsibility and personal accountability. From a very early age the author parents emphasized self-sufficiency, doing him an immense favor that parents rarely bestow upon their children today. For example, he hitchhiked by himself when he was in kindergarten. Compare that to the “self-esteem movement” of the 80’s and 90’s or the “safetyism movement” of today. Some will say that those were “different” times, and I will say that they were better times for sure. Kudos to Joseph Mark Glazner for providing this extraordinary glimpse into America’s past when happiness was less of a pursuit and more of a way of life.
About the reviewer:John C. Krieg is a retired landscape architect and land planner who formerly practiced in Arizona, California, and Nevada. He is also retired as an International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) certified arborist and currently holds seven active categories of California state contracting licenses, including the highest category of Class A General Engineering. He has written a college textbook entitled Desert Landscape Architecture (1999, CRC Press). John has had pieces published in A Gathering of the Tribes, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Across the Margin, Alternating Current, Blue Mountain Review, Cholla Needles, Clark Street Review, Compulsive Reader, Conceit,Down in the Dirt, Hedge Apple, Homestead Review, Indolent Books, Inlandia, Last Leaves, Line Rider Press, LOL Comedy, Lucky Jefferson, Magazine of History and Fiction, Moon City Review,Oddball Magazine, Palm Springs Life, Pandemonium, Pegasus, Pen and Pendulum, Raven Cage, Red Fez,Saint Ann’s Review, South 85 Journal, Squawk Back, The Book Smuggler’s Den, The Courtship of Winds, The Mindful Word, The Scriblerus,The Writing Disorder, These Lines, True Chili, Twist & Twain, White Wall Review,and Wilderness House Literary Review. In conjunction with filmmaker/photographer Charles Sappington, Mr. Krieg has completed a two-part documentary film entitled Landscape Architecture: The Next Generation(2010). In some underground circles John is considered a master grower of marijuana and holds as a lifelong goal the desire to see marijuana federally legalized. Nothing else will do. To that end he published two books in 2022 entitled: Marijuana Tales and California Crazies: The Former Lives and Deaths of Outlaw Pot Farmers. John’s most recent collection of bios and reviews is: Lines & Lyrics: Glimpses of the Writing Life (2019, Adelaide Books). John’s most recent collection of fictional novellas is: Zingers: Five Novellas Blowing Like Dust on the Desert Wind (2020, Anaphora Literary Press). John’s collection of six political and slice-of-life essays is American Turmoil at the Vanguard of the 21st Century (2022).