Three complaisant kids, two stormy parents, one anxious French poodle, too many U-haul trailers, and the potholed road of the early 1960s. Searching for Alpha Centauri is American Public Television artist Gary Spetz's boyhood memoir of living a nomadic life with an impetuous mother, a discontent casino-security-guard step-father, an anxious French poodle, and two complaisant siblings — during the early 1960s. The artist/author paints his moving landscape with words. He adeptly colors these words with both humor and tenderness. Mixed into this tale is the author's deference of history. He effectively interweaves his backdrop of an impending nuclear war, an exciting new space race, an escalating conflict in Vietnam, a rising civil rights movement, the invasion of Beatlemania, and the shocking assassination of a President. Searching for Alpha Centauri is a story of innocence, edification, intrigue, adventure, and endurance. As its boy-protagonist explains, it was "a time of flying bears, where everyone, it seemed, danced into the mystic."