The Last Best Hope

Romance - It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Charles Dickens said it at the beginning of his story about revolution, love and lost dreams. Peter Tauber could have said the same at the start of The Last Best Hope. Fact of the matter is both stories have a preternatural similarity that says much more about life than about two authors from wildly different points of view. Coming of age in the 1960s, Tauber carried the burden of privilege, obligation and socio-political awareness with which all white middle class baby-boomers were burdened. The battles fought to escape or remain affected us all in myriad and more than a few found neither side of the cultural fence to be all it was cracked up to be. The story's protagonist was no different even though his epiphany and subsequent rapture is harsher than most. "You can't always get what you want," said the Stones, "but sometimes you get what you need." Another reviewer used the title American Beauty. If this referenced the movie rather than the Grateful Dead album or a cynical aside, then I applaud that person. That movie is the lineal descendant of The Last Best Hope.