This was a really unique story and I enjoyed reading it. I was not alive during this turbulent period of time but have always been fascinated by it. This book was engaging and thought provoking.

As friendly as I was with a fellow ROTC cadet at the University of Illinois, Art Grange, during the early days of the Vietnam War, I was nowhere near so close to him as protagonist Ray Elias is to a friend of his who voluntarily dons uniform, Gerry Moretti, in Stuart Brody’s evocative novel of those turbulent days, “Humphrey and Me.”
So the news that Art had been killed in Vietnam didn’t make for quite the blow for me that news of Gerry’s death in Vietnam makes for Ray. But Art’s death certainly brought home for me in a very up-close and personal way the tragic toll of the war, which with its 58,000 American deaths made for the most contentious issue for politicians of the time. And arguably one of the most conflicted was Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, whose acquiescence to LBJ on the war makes for perhaps the central question in Brody’s novel and an especially confounding one for Ray, for whom Humphrey had been something of a hero: why?
It’s a question author Brody hashes over in a postscript in which he speculates that it was his father’s dominating personality that made Humphrey unable to pull free of Johnson’s “raw and brutal domination,” just as in the novel Ray labors under the spell of his own father’s “overly critical manner.”
However on or off the mark Brody might be about what made Humphrey so ready to capitulate to LBJ, the manifest tension between the two men over the war dramatically evidences how the war became a lightning rod to an extent not easily imaginable to young people today. So divisive, indeed, did the war become, so fractious to the point of blows practically being thrown at dinner tables, that it remained a part of the American psychic landscape for years afterward, even well into the ‘80s.
Certainly it made me more of a liberal than I'd been before, and, like Ray, looking for someone among my elders whom I could trust in those days when the abiding mantra of the young became not to trust anyone over 30, a disenchantment with the older generation that boiled over into a full-scale conflagration at the ‘68 Chicago Democratic convention, when the blows the protesters suffered from police had them chanting, “the whole world is watching.”
A time so different from today as to seem almost from another planet, the Vietnam era, which was brought back for me with rock-solid authenticity by Brody’s novel, though I couldn’t help thinking that the LBJ of the real world was perhaps a bit more complex or conflicted than the LBJ as presented in the book, even if his legendary coarseness is in full display in a scene in which he’s urinating while talking to Humphrey.
Humphrey, though, is the real political focus of the novel, with sections narrated by him alternating with ones narrated by Ray, making for occasional momentary confusion for a reader as to who’s speaking. Also, I couldn't help wondering just how true to life his depicted inner thoughts were, as well as how much actual truth there was to scenes when Humphrey intercedes on protesters' behalf at the convention or on blacks’ behalf at an employment office.
Nevertheless, Brody’s novel is right-on about those times from the standpoint of someone who lived through them and also true to the aim that Brody expresses in the afterword of holding up Humphrey as an instance of a politician who exemplified goodness and virtue, qualities singularly lacking in our own times on the Republican side, anyway, when a former president, with his incitement of an attempted insurrection and propagation of the Big Lie about a free and fair election and seeming adoration of the vilest dictators seems the very antithesis of those qualities.

Thanks to NetGalley for a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. I sought this book because I love historical fiction and I knew next to nothing about Hubert Humphrey. I definitely learned about this political figure in a very entertaining way. It was engaging throughout. I am not a huge fan of first person books but this one works. I liked the main character and I felt like the book conveyed well the theme that people can be good even when they are flawed. It was called a young adult book but I really think that adults would be more interested than kids (even teens) because of the historical content. I would definitely read more by this author.
I am giving it 4.5 stars (4 below) and not 5 because I felt like it was just a tad slow at the beginning and one other minor thing, which is that the story went back and forth between the teenage character's I voice and Hubert Humphrey's I voice with no signpost. I think it would have been a little less confusing if it said whose perspective it was at the beginning of the book. But all in all, a great debut by a promising author.

HUMPHREY AND ME by Stuart H. Brody is a work of historical fiction that covers almost two decades beginning in the early 1960s. There are two narrators: Ray Elias, initially a bit of a nerdy a high school student who gets involved in politics, and Hubert Humphrey – first as Senator, then as VP and presidential candidate and finally as a Senator again. As any student of American history knows this was an exciting, turbulent time in American history and Humphrey was a key character involved with civil rights and progressive politics. What troubled me was the book’s depiction of him as talking about war protestors as "Hitler-loving youth" – I could not find that quote in any of the databases or online sources I checked. Yes, this is a work of fiction, but it is important to accurately portray a person of Humphrey's stature. Brody, who is a professional speaker on ethics, did not cite his sources in the preview that I saw, leading to further questions about his descriptions of Humphrey's musings and state of mind. Important events, like Kent State, were not even mentioned (although Humphrey had spoken on campus). And, while the story may be semi-autobiographical, Ray was very self-centered and not that well developed. The work that Humphrey did to improve quality of life for Minnesotans and Americans is inspiring (and we could all do with some inspirational leadership from politicians these days); reading a biography (even one intended for young people) would be my recommendation instead of this novel.

I'm wary of the "novel loosely based on events that really happened" that uses real people's names. Do Vice-Presidents of the United States really make the time to visit student campaign volunteers in their dorm rooms? If we forgive that scene, though, and the first-person chapters in which Vice-President Humphrey can't get that student volunteer off his mind, this is a readable novel about a likable teenager whose interest in politics wins him interesting jobs and friends.

Ray Elias, the fictional stand-in for the young Stuart Brody, is mostly a good student who gets along reasonably well with his family. Still, there are disagreements. Ray doesn't get as much attention from his parents as he might want; when then-Senator Humphrey rewards him with attention, Ray starts thinking of the Senator as another parent figure, and the way he wrote the novel suggests that Stuart Brody still does feel that way.

The resulting study of a young man's complex feelings about his father works pretty well as historical fiction or just as a nostalgia trip. People who are interested in this kind of book will probably like "Humphrey and Me."