S'More Than A Feeling

Hank Stuever: Having thoroughly plumbed the joys and pains of the suburban Jewish coming-of-age scene of the 1970s and '80s ("Bar Mitzvah Disco"), the people at the so-called Academy of the Recent Past have turned their curatorial eyes to a book project so heartbreakingly rendered that it almost hurts to look too closely at the results.

But look we must. Stare, readers, into the woods deliberately (apologies to Henry David Thoreau) and come back with us to summer camp, in the acid-wash-George-Michael haze of a certain, brief era. Come do your hair and suffer through crushing puppy love and trade mix-tapes. Come for forced participation in sports; come fight the end-of-summer tribal color wars (or any variation of capture-the-flag); come for the mind wedgie. At 12, you get sent off to camp and feel homesick. At 36 (or 38 or 41), you'd do anything to go back to camp. This is a book about that longing.

"Camp Camp: Where 'Fantasy Island' Meets 'Lord of the Flies' " is being shelved in the humor section of your friendly big-box bookstore and on that one "wacky books" table at Urban Outfitters stores, because, sure, it is funny.

And yet, a few pages in, you start to wonder if there isn't some whole other category to which "Camp Camp" belongs. This is the real stuff, going deeper than any VH1 '80s nostalgia trip or a squandered Saturday afternoon watching a cable rerun of "Meatballs," Ivan Reitman's seminal 1979 summer camp comedy -- which gets big ups in "Camp Camp." (Reitman pens a brief foreword, honored that anyone still watches "Meatballs" and saying that all summer camp experiences are universal -- "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah," and so on.)