According to Library Journal, Dan Zevin is "Dave Barry with an attitude," a title he earns primarily by peppering his humorous essays with the occasional smidgen of profanity and a single reference to hand jobs. Really, Zevin is more like Barry with a dash of Gen-X cred, which he comes perilously close to sacrificing for The Day I Turned Uncool. Zevin's short, bouncy collection of essays on the dreaded onset of "maturity"—the encroaching force which turns all-night bar-hoppers into everyday garden enthusiasts—takes the form of a series of anecdote-supported "confessions": "I take pride in my lawn," "I developed an interest in etiquette," "I went to a wine tasting," and so forth. Zevin occasionally adopts a self-flagellating tone as he considers how different he was a bare few years ago, before he'd sampled golf, therapy, and other uncool, grown-up pastimes. But he has a habit of forgetting to hate himself, instead digging into the lighthearted details of exactly how he selected the proper grass seed for his geographical region, or started going to restaurants (chosen uncoolly out of a Zagat guide) for post-entertainment desserts. Not that these lapses particularly impede The Day I Turned Uncool. Some of the book's best essays do address the change-of-life topic directly, particularly "The World Is No Longer My Oyster," in which Zevin compares a college semester in Denmark with a week he and his wife recently spent in Madrid. The images of a youthful Zevin eagerly sleeping on train-station steps and exulting over the "primo hash" that's "totally allowed" in Denmark, contrasted with the current Zevin's fuming over the "poor air quality" in a Spanish train, are simultaneously funny and eerie, at least for anyone who's both been young and accidentally come anywhere near adulthood. But he's equally effective when circling around his thesis, telling stories that picture him clinging to the faint shadow of youthful rebellion, even in the most unlikely scenarios. Zevin's major flaw is that he's often too self-referential. As a freelance writer scrambling for compelling topics, he sometimes samples adult things just so he can write about the horror of having sampled them; at other times, he writes about his own writing. The results are too self-conscious and inbred, but then, youthful solipsism is still somewhat cool. Zevin's occasional lack of perspective just proves he hasn't entirely grown up yet, which should make him reasonably happy.