It may be a cliche to call someone’s story one that could only happen in America, but that’s about the only way to describe Cary D. Lowe’s memoir, BECOMING AMERICAN, an enjoyable, breezy read about a man of the baby boom generation who lived a very unique life.

Lowe, a respected California attorney, may not be a household name, but he’s lived a long and colorful life. Born Jewish in Austria in the 1940s, Lowe’s father went to work in Europe for American intelligence and his mother was a Holocaust survivor. Named for Cary Grant, Lowe spent his childhood in postwar Europe, moving among different countries as his father got different assignments. Growing up in the aftermath of the Holocaust was clearly a formative experience for the author, as were the many nights he sat around listening to stories from his father’s colleagues. The framing device for BECOMING AMERICAN has Lowe in Eastern Europe with his daughter, searching for the hard-to-find graves of his great-grandparents.

About halfway through the book, Lowe comes to the United States and becomes a citizen soon after. He goes to college at USC and has a relatively unhappy stint in the Navy, as a growing political conscience- spurred by family memories of the Holocaust, observations of the Jim Crow South and other factors – leads him to turn against the Vietnam War. After that, Lew becomes an activist lawyer, helping to found the People’s College of Law in Los Angeles, before segueing into a series of other careers, including teaching, real estate, involvement in California politics, and good old-fashioned legal practice.

In between, Lowe saw the Beatles in concert, happened to be in L.A. during the Watts riots, and even, as a teenager, had a hair-raising encounter with a couple of topless women on a boat in Germany. The latter story, Lowe acknowledges, might be viewed as sexual abuse by modern sensibilities. Sure, it’s not always clear in the narrative which year it is, or how much time has passed from chapter to chapter, and Lowe only touches on his two marriages, including the death of his first wife, in a single chapter near the end. And while the book jacket implies that Lowe was “associated” with the likes of Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, he was really a campaign volunteer for both, and only met McGovern once (he did, in fact, work directly with Tom Hayden, and also got to know his then-wife, Jane Fonda.) Nevertheless, BECOMING AMERICAN is a very enjoyable read, which explores the author’s place in the often-tumultuous second half of the 20th century. Boomers may not be the most popular generation these days, but Cary Lowe is a better boomer than most, and his story is one worth telling.

Readers may not know Cary D. Lowe’s name, but the California lawyer and Democratic political activist weaves a fascinating and often poignant immigrant story.

~Stephen Silver, for IndieReader