Essential for Deadheads but also an engaging cultural portrait for anyone interested in the era.
The high life and low times of the original Acid King.
Augustus Owsley Stanley III (1935-2011), aka “Bear,” may not be a widely known counterculture figure, but the 1960s wouldn’t have been the same without him. He was Walter White without all the moral conflict or drama, a trailblazing alchemist who mass-produced LSD and made millions before anyone thought to make it illegal. As presented by prolific rock scribe Greenfield (Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye: The Rolling Stones on the Road to Exile, 2014, etc.) in this amiable life story, Stanley was the kind of peripatetic loser who flunked out at everything but drugs. Once he discovered the hallucinogen, he drew on his jack-of-all-trades skills and the expertise of his chemist girlfriend to produce it in large quantities. The result was a product known for both its intensity and purity; as Steely Dan would later sing of Stanley, “on the hill, the stuff was laced with kerosene / But yours was kitchen clean.” Stanley thought of himself as a gourmet chef, a “master of fine mental cuisine.” He would also become the key backstage figure for the Grateful Dead, whom he helped bankroll in their early days, as well as becoming their legendary recording engineer. Greenfield recounts Stanley’s life with an ample amount of interviews from his subject as well as family members and the surviving members of the Dead; all remember a generally likable, if frustrating and paranoid, control freak. As a subject, Bear remains interesting long after his era has passed, although the book loses some energy toward the end, as Greenfield describes the quotidian details of the day leading up to Bear’s fatal 2011 car wreck.
Essential for Deadheads but also an engaging cultural portrait for anyone interested in the era.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08121-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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