Reviews for Tiger in a Trance

The average rating for Tiger in a Trance based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-07-26 00:00:00 Gayle Moore I picked up 'Tiger in a Trance' and have already recommended it to a couple of bookish friends as well as a few musicians. I love the steady blend of prose, plot, and dialogue, and would also love to blaze a bowl with Mr. Ludington and talk craft... but the hidden pleasure of the book is listening along to the shows he's talking about in each chapter. I mean the chapters have complete narrative arcs and serve as both commentaries on the Dead as well as correlation of Life and the Road with, like, documented happenings. I first noticed this when I was jarred from the text on page 7. A character drops this dialogue bomb of a Grateful Dead set-list: "Lost Sailor-Drums-Space-Saint" and I put the book down and Googled it up... it was a rare set-list; the Dead played it in Richmond, VA on November 1st 1985. Here's a link to a recording: Furthermore, at the risk of sounding trite, it's an amazing drum solo (even if the recording leaves a little wanting). Without getting into all the particulars, let's just say the Grateful Dead will be studied like Milton someday--even if only at a handful Eastern seaboard liberal arts colleges. So, I'm working on a short piece about the fall-out of their 1982 show at the Salt Palace: Particularly, 'Friend of the Devil,' which--at this show--was good enough to ring tears from a stone.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-02-11 00:00:00 Elizabeth Champ An excellent rendering of a particular scene and era that puts the reader inside the head of an 18-year-old Deadhead. While some liberty is taken with the protagonists' vocabulary (he's a high school dropout -- albeit an educated one -- with the vocabulary of a Milton scholar) I found the stylized first person perspective enjoyable. If anything, my personal tastes would have run to a more expansive plot around the Dead and the scene rather than the negative trajectory of drug addiction, but of course, anyone with any familiarity with that scene at all knows the two are tightly linked.