Review: 100 Wild Mushrooms, by Eva Pasco

The Sixties – an iconic era both for those who were lucky enough to live it, and for those of us who were born just a bit too late. Eva Pasco lived and loved the Sixties, and in “100 Wild Mushrooms” she has put together a lovely collection of 100 memories from the time – little stories that will fill those who remember themselves with nostalgia, and immensely enlighten and entertain the others!

Life was different in the days of Twiggy, the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement – and especially for a teenager like Eva, it was a mixture of fashion mania, beat music, fun and games, and fear of a nuclear war. And even though we’ve all seen those good old TV shows like “The Flintstones” and “The Ed Sullivan Show” in repeats and watched documentaries on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, on the first Moon landing and on Woodstock, we post-60s folks can only guess what it was REALLY like to grow up in these days.

All that fun kids had in the 60s – smoking candy cigarettes, eating sweets all day, watching ‘subversive’ cartoons like “The Bugs Bunny Show”; neither was there much concern about health dangers – Mercurochrome, spray paint, modelling glue, unchilled lunch boxes. Such carefree days!

Eating at the burger bar, driving out on a Sunday with the family, watching Western series on TV – a wonderful childhood! Eva Pasco tells us about lots of little incidents from school, from her family life and with her friends back in Lincoln, Rhode Island, and with a wonderful sense of humour and a healthy bit of nostalgia (but no sentimentality) she makes the 60s come alive again. She reminds us of the toys of the time, the biggest hit songs, the TV programmes, but she also conveys something that people who didn’t live the days don’t know about: the SPIRIT of the time – what life was like.

Thanks to the division into lots of little chapters, “100 Wild Mushrooms” never gets boring for a moment; we’re taken directly from one adventure to the next. A wonderful read especially for those of us who were born ‘too late’, a great chance to catch a glimpse of life during that magical decade!