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I think Cameron Crowe was brilliant for taking an atempt like this and going undercover.
Amazon review:
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'For as long as people have been coming-of-age in our society, authors have tried to capture the extraordinarily diverse array of feelings associated with adolescence. Many have successfully captured some aspect, some portion of those feelings, but usually through a specific lens or promoting a specific agenda. Nobody has succeeded in simply describing, with little embellishment and no judgmentalism, how it really feels to be a teenager in America. Nobody, that is, except Cameron Crowe. Nearly 20 years ago, Crowe went undercover to spend a year inside a high school in southern California. Going in, Crowe was already a seasoned reporter on music and pop culture, but was youthful enough to appear legitimate as a high school student. He forged relationships with students that were just close enough to learn all the details of their lives, but not too close to interfere with what he was trying to observe. As fans of the entertaining movie (The first effort of "Clueless" director Amy Heckerling) are well aware, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" is filled with enough teenage sex, drug use, rivalry, and relationship angst to be amusing on a purely visceral level. The book, however, is able to examine the real people behind the images. We learn that Linda is not quite as sexually confident as she first appears, that Damone is frightened and lonely behind the tough-guy swagger. We see that Brad and Stacy share a complicated sibling love, not just the rivalry. We understand what it was really like to be ad Ridgemont High in the late 1970's. What continues to set this book apart twenty years later is the timlessness and diversity of its characters. There is no one single character who stands out; instead Crowe focuses on a range of people who between them reflect the full range of American youth. Time has not diminished the power or the universality of the characters' emotions. Twenty years later, Crowe's work remains an American masterpiece. '</font>
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