Riots Of Passage (PDF download)

Description

“We have spent this entire summer living on chipped ham and No-Doz…”

In this highly anticipated follow-up to his memoir “One Hundred Virgins,” the author continues to document in riotous fashion life on a major college campus, in a major U.S. city. Though specifically Ohio State University and Columbus, Ohio, in a sense the particulars don’t matter because such experiences, though often outrageous, are universal ones.

Joined by his familiar cast of fellow reprobates, along with a healthy crop of fresh recruits, this crew closes out their final year exploring campus. If the first six months were centered around discovery, then this epoch finds them operating under the banner of refinement and expansion. As always, the journey is nothing if not wildly unpredictable, and a continual reminder that it’s often best to just start running, with no end goal in sight.

If I had to describe how any of us, and certainly yours truly, ever manages to accomplish anything, McGathey observes in these passages, I would say it runs something like this: we start down a hallway toward the object of our desire at the other end, but a rug is pulled out from under us, just about on a daily basis, before we get anywhere near it. Yet every so often, after landing on the floor, you happen to spot this secret passage in the wall that you never would have noticed otherwise. Certainly not by remaining back on the starting block. And this passage commonly leads to something as good as or even better than what you originally mapped.

Whatever the case, you are not likely to read a more open and riotously honest memoir anytime soon. Riots Of Passage is and will surely remain a refreshing, unflinching take on the modern twentysomething experience, one to which just about everyone is sure to relate.