I would be lying if I said I didn't envy Robert Stone's life. From the mid-fifties through the mid-seventies, he lived at the periphery, and sometimes in the center, of the cultural storms that forever changed America. Always a keen observer, and often a less than impartial participant, Stone's life coursed through many of the truly epic times and places of the beginning of the end of the 20th century. A tough-luck childhood in Brooklyn and Manhattan, a post-war tour in the Navy, on a science boat exploring Antarctica, a return to the emerging beat movement in New York, a year in the blossoming, sultry revival of New Orleans, working with Stegner at Stanford while experimenting with Kesey in the foothills, making do in a writer's exile in Paris and London, a journalist's tenure in the crumbling landscape of a lost Vietnam, a few bleached out months in Charles Manson's Hollywood. It's all there.
Written as a lucid, honest, and intimate portrait of Robert Stone's life as he progressed through each of these memorable episodes, Prime Green is an excellent memoir - a fun read, full of momentum, but also a clearly and closely detailed portrait of a life and of an era. Charting Stone's course as he evolved from a struggling writer to a respected novelist, always probing and pushing against the boundaries of personal experience and of the culture itself, Prime Green offers a unique perch from which to absorb the drama, tumult, and delight of America's great cultural upheavals. Well worth your time.
And the NYT's excellent review here.
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