This comic romance is set at a small bohemian liberal arts college in Vermont. Embarking on his first teaching job in a longed-for idyllic New England country setting, Richie Schuster’s marriage to snarky and glamorous wife, Sally, soon goes up in flames, along with his academic career as he declares war on his fellow faculty members. Contains many excellent farcial blackouts and sharp, Pinter-like dialogue.This was James Howard Kunstler’s second novel, published in 1981, some time before he became better known as a social critic and author of the acclaimed non-fiction books The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic. Reviewers pilloried Kunstler as “just another unhappy divorced college professor writing about his sorry life,” but Kunstler had never taught school at any level and had never been married when he wrote the book.

"It is the summer of 1967, and Andy Newmark, a 17-year-old New Yorker, takes a maintenance job at a Thunder (read Fire) Island resort. The reader is carried along by Andy's sense of exploration as he works, makes friends, surfs, and experiments with drugs, alcohol and sex. All the while, the fear of not being accepted to college and so being drafted into Vietnam hovers over him. Gradually overcoming personal conflictshis parents' divorce, his fear of failure and the social ills he encounters: the war, the prejudice he experiences as a Jew at a Catholic club, the decadence of Thunder Island by summer's end, Andy feels comfortable with himself and the dimensions of the adult world he is entering. Andy and his friends are likable, even if they seem as deeply characterized as the people in the rock songs that play everywhere on Thunder Island. And, like many novels of initiation, the adults are portrayed as ridiculous stuffed-shirts. Overall, though hackneyed expressions and trite situations diminish the effect of its simple story of innocence and discovery, this novel has charm. Steeped in the news and social events of the time as they appeared to young adults then, Thunder Island offers a sentimental, nostalgic version of adolescence in the late '60s and will be a welcome read on the beach in the late '80s."--Publishers weekly