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Title: Sweet, Entertaining, Nostalgic
Review: "Cursed by a Happy Childhood" is a memoir about growing up on the eastern end of Long Island (the North Fork), 100 miles east of Manhattan, in a rural setting. (This is not the Long Island of suburban/urban Nassau County, but of a far more rural, sheltered place, east of the corn fields and north of the touristed Hamptons.) The author wrote the memoir as a series of vignettes filled with both reflections on his own mostly innocent childhood paired with advice for his own tween-aged daughter. It is sweet, largely positive, and endearing. The ten-page postscript is the largest detractor of this book: it appears to have been written separately from the rest of the memoir (perhaps an earlier, shorter version), often repeating vignettes, examples, and phrasing from earlier in the book; it seems to have been incorporated last minute and appears to have escaped the red ink of the editor as there are numerous typos. Read the book, but skip the last 10 pages.
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