Welcome to San Diego, the book begins, sardonically, given how ill at ease Fredman feels as a young Jew and aspiring poet in his seemingly paradisal hometown. In short chapters that read like prose poems, he retrieves and assembles pieces of memory and sets them against one another, building an exquisite architecture of experiences--as Jew, Californian, poet, drummer, surfer, hippie, and professor--brought into conjunction by attempts to make sense...