In his extravagantly acclaimed memoir The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff recounted life with his father, a confidence man. Now he gives us the story of his own coming of age - the moral (sometimes immoral) education of the student, writer, teacher, friend, husband and father. A Day at the Beach rings with the same subtle, spirited, musical voice as The Duke of Deception, and with the same startling high-stakes candor.The book is constructed around the title piece, in which Wolff tells hilariously of the misbegotten Caribbean holiday during which he was struck down, and of his subsequent open-heart surgery. The personal history leading to and from this brush with death in the middle of life carries us through a wildly varied sequence of locales: from the rarefied literary circles of academia to the smoky jazz clubs of Greenwich Village; from the red-light district of Istanbul to a Vermont country fair; from the slopes of the Matterhorn to the heart of the Gulf Stream.If the geographic range of Wolff's recollections is wide, so too is the scope of the formative experiences he describes with such unflinching self-awareness. In "Apprentice," he traces his vocational evolution from the gentle dismantling of his grandiose scholarly ambitions to the birth of the author. In "The Great Santa," he casts a wide net over Wolff family Christmases past to show how the son notoriously acted upon became the young man blithely acting. In "The Company Man and the Revolutionary," Wolff gives us the anatomy of a friendship blown apart by the theatrical political bluster of the 1960s - the story of how his best buddy, a committed radical, came to believe that Wolff was a CIA spy under deep cover. And in "Matterhorn," Wolff approaches the mountain freighted with all the obsessiveness, apprehension and last-chance risk-taking that accompany a man's descent along the leeward side of life.The long concluding piece, "Waterway," is a love story of a long and perilous passage at sea - Wolff alone with his wife, and then with one son and then the other. It is the record of an alert man learning through the unsettling disjunctions of time, space and local custom and through the forces of hardship and hazard. But it is also the endpoint for a longer journey - for Wolff, the final stop along the way to becoming the man who has had his Day at the Beach. Read Less