IN TOUCH

In Touch is a hot potato and cold turkey. . . . At twenty, young Steinbeck went to Saigon as a member of the Armed Forces Radio and Television and spent considerable time in the pleasure salons there with their remarkable sensuous impact. He also resolved his own political position and finding no rationale for the war (just obligation) took to the ""dove's perch."" Returning after a year, he wrote an article on marijuana which would appear in The Washingtonian and got circumstantially involved with a young man who had a head shop and who was later arrested. This led to young Steinbeck's own trial--all presented here. Steinbeck, a self-styled liaison between the generations and airing interconnective views on our culture and its lack of values, proceeds from the particular--the importance of marijuana as a euphoric emollient in Vietnam where he conjectures that roughly half of the soldiers are users--to the general statement made in the article which is also the objective of the book: ""marijuana does not seem to get in the way of anything except ignorance about marijuana."" (And of course the law.) Over and above some of the contestable remarks,-Steinbeck is not only In Touch but he's also very much of a Writer, accentuating, accelerating, the immediate experience.