Mango Lassie

They say, "If you can remember the Sixties, you probably weren't there." Happily, Dougie MacKenzie recalls those zonked and zany times and brings them hilariously back to life in his regaling memoir, Mango Lassie. MacKenzie reveals himself as a preadolescent trapped in the "rat" system of a Southern military school. From an abyss of despair following the death of his brother, the disaffected teen finds solace in the arms of two girls he meets in France and pursues later as a freshman at Georgetown. Avidly a lad with the ladies - and cutting an amorous swathe that Valentino would've envied, MacKenzie woos his women from the steamy streets of Pigalle to the waxed dance floors of Washington's Embassy Row. At Georgetown University, at the height of the Vietnam War, MacKenzie meets his match in the uproarious Peter Fletcher. In the thrall of his man-about-town mentor, MacKenzie is spirited through the doors of perception, and, ultimately - with the aid of a churlish dean - booted through the doors of expulsion. Mango Lassie rollicks with wit and the follies of impassioned youth. It is a cunning chronicle of college life that belongs on every bookshelf between Brideshead Revisited and Stover at Yale.