Sean Mitchell was teaching English at a private school in Ohio when the New Journalism piqued his interest and lured him toward a profession that was much harder to crack than he imagined. After an editor in Washington, D.C. finally gave him a chance, he found a calling that would require and reveal multiple skills: editing an “underground” newspaper in his hometown of Dallas, writing magazine length stories about long distance truckers and Z.Z. Top, serving as the Dallas Times Herald’s first rock critic and then its theatre critic, winning national recognition for his reviews.

Moving to Los Angeles to cover Hollywood for the strangely singular and doomed Herald Examiner and then the Los Angeles Times, he profiled stars like Clint Eastwood, Ann-Margret and his irascible former St. Mark’s School of Texas soccer teammate Tommy Lee Jones. While examining the nation’s preoccupation with celebrity, he wondered if journalists like him were part of the problem or part of the solution?

Such introspection fills this memoir of a young reporter and critic, the only child of two creative but very different parents. It harks back to scenes of Dallas in the 1950s and '60s, framing a boy's discovery of sports, girls, hootenannies, F. Scott Fitzgerald and himself. He saw the counterculture and Vietnam War overtake the traditions of the Ivy League, experienced the excitement of a big city newsroom, spent a life-changing summer at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, and got close enough to Hollywood to blink.