SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

by Abbie Hoffman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1980

Abbie looks back at the glory years. After a cute and cheeky treatment of his Jewish boyhood (wild summers at the Cape, the intellectual big-time at Brandeis) and an ill-conceived early marriage, Hoffman gets down to important business: Southern protest marches, the CIA and LSD, hippies, yippies, 1968 and Chicago, Woodstock and Weathermen. Make what you will of Abbie (he sees himself as half-martyr, half-hustler), this insider's remembrance of protests past is at its best where Abbie's at his most serious: Chicago. First, though, he goes through an internship in his hometown of Worcester, Mass.--salesman by day, organizer by night. Soon fired, he heads for New York and the Lower East Side ""like a kid shortstop being called up to the majors."" Along with early hippie arrivals, he showers the stock exchange with dollar bills; later, in league with second wife Anita and Jerry Rubin, he creates the concept of the ""yippie"" as ""the political hippie. A flower child who's been busted. A stoned-out warrior of the Aquarian Age."" Also, as someone who was going to Chicago. There, with the whole world watching, yippie protest turned into pitched battle: the morning after the first night, Abbie remembers Lincoln Park as looking ""not unlike the scene in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett walks among the wounded. . . ."" Some of the most striking bits are the short shots: Abbie having lunch with his two police tails in Chicago; Abbie's American flag shirt being ""blued-out"" during the telecast of his appearance on the Merv Griffin show; yippies storming Disneyland and planting the Vietcong flag on top of Mount Matter-horn. After surviving the Chicago Seven trial, Abbie was busted in 1974 and fled underground, where he's now become active in community organizing--something which, he says, he's been doing all along. ""It was just the Vietnam War that made the community bigger. That's all."" Grist for the mill now that the Sixties are ancient history. Grist for psychologists still trying to figure Abbie out. And insights: on the moral education of a radical; on the tension between ideas and action (""The notion of acting out your ideas,"" Dwight MacDonald once told Abbie, ""defies the intellectual tradition""); and, finally, on the repressive reaction of a government when brought face to face with the absurd.

Pub Date: April 1, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION