Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
by Robert Stone
Our Price: $17.13
List Price: $25.95
You Save: $8.82 (34%)
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. It's a long, strange trip that's navigated in this engaging memoir. Novelist Stone (A Hall of Mirrors) recounts his salad days from a stint in the navy in the late 1950s to a desultory trip to Vietnam as a correspondent during the disastrous 1971 invasion of Laos. Stone largely sat out the civil rights and antiwar movements and cops to no ideology beyond “ordinary decency.” His bailiwick was the relatively apolitical counterculture, which dawned for him when he took in Coltrane, Lenny Bruce and peyote in San Francisco in the early '60s and really kicked in when he entered the circle of literary provocateur and psychedelic guru Ken Kesey, the book's presiding genius. Memorable encounters with hallucinogens, and the resulting states of heightened awareness and stoned reflection, therefore loom large. But Stone's story, from a cross-country bus trip in which he ran a gauntlet of antihippie persecution to a stint crafting lurid headlines and freakish fables for sleazy supermarket tabloids, is also a funny, entertaining picaresque. (His big-picture ruminations–say, on the links between the CIA, the drug culture and Silicon Valley–sometimes have a period-authentic muzziness.) But Stone is a born storyteller, with a wonderful feel for place and character that vividly evokes the cultural gulf America crossed in that decade. Photos. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The 1960s have been rehashed so often that it's hard for those who missed them to imagine the sense of change and possibility that so many felt. In this memoir, Stone manages to make those feelings palpable. He starts with a 1958 visit to South Africa as a navy journalist and ends with a 1971 trip to Vietnam, a civilian writer this time. In between, he ponders his fate, does hackwork, starts a family, takes drugs, writes some, travels, befriends Ken Kesey, and witnesses the beginning of what we now call the culture wars. As he revisits scenes from his own life, he extrapolates insight about the times and about himself and his artistic growth. His crystalline prose makes the project seem simple, but, of course, it's not; achingly honest and unself-serving, Stone fixes on different details and observes them differently. And whether readers have forgotten or never believed it, they'll finish the book thinking that things were really different then--without being forced to acknowledge that things were better then, too. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Details
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Ecco (January 5, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060198168
ISBN-13: 978-0060198169
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.05 pounds
