Book Report: Lake of the Ozarks by Bill Geist (2019)

Gentle reader, I cannot find this book in a Good Book Hunting post, and I apologize as I know you, like I, relish the chance to revisit when and where I bought a particular book in the last 20 years. Now, as this is a 2019 book, clearly I did not buy the book before starting the Good Book Hunting posts. As it is in very nice shape and has no penciled prices in it, I have to guess I bought this new, perhaps as part of spending Christmas gift card or picked up while picking up Christmas gift cards. It has all the marks (figurative) of browsing the local interest section of the book store. Or perhaps I am a kleptomaniac who stoled it and don’t remember doing so.

Anyway: Purportedly, this book talks about his experiences working at his uncle’s resort at the Lake of the Ozarks in the 1960s. But, unfortunately, the book is lightest on that which would be the most interesting.

It begins a bit with a contemporary frame story: The author is driving a rental car along I-70 to catch a plane from Lambert to La Guardia when he comes to the exit that one would have taken to get to the Lake of the Ozarks. Not me, of course, as I would come up I-44 to Lebanon and turn north. But he decides he’s going to see what the lake is like now, and we get a bit of a rambly prologue.

He then does describe his aunt and uncle who end up running the place and how they, and he, from Champaign, Illinois, ended up there. Then we get some stories woven into the chapters, and then we get some short chapters that are brain dumps of the stories, some photos of what the place where the lodge had been had it not been demolished decades ago, and finis!.

So it’s a little light in what would have been the most interesting part of it, recreating the scene of the lodge in the 1960s. And what we do have has a double-effect narrator who pops in to point out that in the 1960s, people were not as right-thinking as 21st century New York media personalities are, so we get mea maxima culpa bits about off-color humor or the cultural appropriation of waitresses who dressed as stylized squaws (and that’s badthink!) We also get a paragraph of how the author knew a certain developer was a LIAR! a long time ago. Shut up, you putz: Up until 2016, when you had contact or interviews with Donald Trump, you probably thought he was a good get or good for some colorful column inches or a segment on national television, not that he was clearly the Biggest Threat to Democracy the World Will Ever Know (Until the Next One).

So, a bit of a hard pass here. Not a lot of the nostalgia/history that I like, and certainly I don’t like it in a tone that looks back with judgment for variance with modern sentiments of the elite.

One thing I will note is that the book starts out with an epigraph from Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.

That’s from her poem “Solitude”.

Gentle reader, I have been holding back on you: A couple of weeks ago, I went to ABC Books for a book signing for Trina Wilcox, a local author whom I’ve met and whom I’ve followed in various 5Ks (she being a serious runner, me being someone running the 5Ks because I didn’t want to make small talk with other parents of the middle school cross country team when they, the team, ran the 5Ks). I didn’t write a Good Book Hunting post on the trip nor book reports for the children’s books I go signed. I did however pick up an Ella Wheeler Wilcox collection, Maurine and Other Poems. Which was lying atop this book.

“Solitude” is not in this collection, but I was tickled to see the epigraph in a book adjacent to a book by the same poet. Things like this happen at Nogglestead.

And as I told my beautiful wife about the book, I mentioned that the author is (was) a color/humor commentator on CBS, and she had no idea who he is–nor did I. However, I asked my mother-in-law on Easter, and she said, “Willie Geist? On the Today show?” Oh, so close. Willie Geist is the author’s son, the heir to the mediastocracy. To be honest, my mother-in-law watches a lot of television news, so she’s probably seen the author as well.

Although the author has written, what, eight other books, I don’t think I’ll pick them up. I don’t know why modern humor writing leaves me so cold, but anything besides Dave Barry…. meh.