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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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