(Finalist Medal winner, USA Book News Awards ): Berkeley-Paris Express is the colorful and important story of the explorations of a young composer (the author as a young man) who has quit popular music and has begun to write his first symphony. No special knowledge of music or painting is required of the reader. In his teens, as a guitar playing prodigy, Webster Young was acquainted with Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Baxter (Doobie Brothers), and John Kay (Steppenwolf). His life changed forever after he met, in the tumult of Berkeley in 1968, a brilliant expressionist painter, Kenneth Frantz, a follower of Carl Jung's psychology, who became his mentor. (Frantz studied with David Park and was part of the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950's. His paintings are seen for the first time in tis book, in 14 illustrations. ) Young discovered a road to artistic sanity - a new basis for meaning in art and music. Berkeley-Paris Express is the memoir of his discovery of the "big ideas of music and life" after his conversion to classical music. It is about the influences of people and places upon him - first, that of Kenneth Frantz the painter, and later, that of the city of Paris and the Juilliard School. The middle third of the book concerns the author's first time in Paris; the last third is about the Juilliard School and New York. 69 illustrations include paintings by Chagall, Rouault, Corot, and Kenneth Miller Frantz.