Tag Archives: sixties

Book Review:  Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir by Jann S. Wenner; Part One: The Era

I have recently read several histories and memoirs of the 1960s and 1970s, some of which are newly published. For instance, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff tells of the entrepreneurial creator of the influential … Continue reading

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Book Review:  A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNally – Part Two: Locale

Although the Grateful Dead eventually toured all over the United States and around the world, their origin story is inexorably linked with the San Francisco Bay Area. The late sixties, when the Dead came to prominence, was a heady time … Continue reading

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Book Review:  A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNally – Part One: Background

I don’t think I ever heard of the Grateful Dead until in 1970 at the age of seventeen I headed down to Santa Clara University from Seattle for my first and only year of college. I was immature, naive, and … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

I’m always on the lookout for good books on the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The title of this biography emphasizes Brand’s main contribution to that era, The Whole Earth Catalog. Though it delves into the making of … Continue reading

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The Misadventures of Mama Kitchen is now on sale!

I have discovered that for some reason (unbeknownst to me) Amazon has drastically marked down the price of the paperback edition of my novel The Misadventures of Mama Kitchen. Pick up a copy quick while it’s on sale! In my … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon by Robert Kurson

I have read numerous books about NASA and the space program, and Rocket Men is one of the more interesting and illuminating ones. Before I read this, I was unaware of the extreme danger and urgency of Apollo 8. What … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

The two books of Colson Whitehead’s that I have read previous to this one, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, have been exciting and original works of fiction, and both, incidentally, have won the Pulitzer Prize. Along with his … Continue reading

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Bedlam Battle Omnibus Now in Hardcover!

I’ve had stories published in hardcover anthologies before, but this is the first of my own 28 books to appear in a hardcover edition. Looks good, feels good, and reads great! Bedlam Battle: An Omnibus of the One Thousand Series … Continue reading

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On Rereading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

I first read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test back in the early 1970s when I was dabbling in the psychedelic culture from the perspective of a university in the San Francisco Bay Area. Taking psychedelics and smoking pot was almost … Continue reading

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Book Review: American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley

This is a fascinating book about America’s efforts to conquer space during the Cold War. However, it is not a comprehensive history of the space program. Instead, it focuses on John F. Kennedy’s fixation on space exploration and eventually on … Continue reading

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