Reviews for Prime green

The average rating for Prime green based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-09 00:00:00 Mark Zimmerman I've had the good fortune to read two excellent literary memoirs in the last week or so. This one, and Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow. Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties is and superbly written. The author's ability to compress this picaresque decade of his life into a mere 230 pages is a marvel. Stone has long been considered a writer's writer, still, I would lay odds that some of his nimble phrasing here came from honing these tales at dinner parties and other venues over the years. The book is very funny. It opens with Stone at the helm of the USS Arneb. At sea he keeps two pictures over his desk: one of Bridget Bardot, the other of the New York City skyline. These he calls the poles of his desire. His descent into yellow journalism is interesting. On discharge he went to work for the New York Daily News, perhaps no worse then than it is today, and later for a few scuzzy National Enquirer-like rags. There he was responsible for headlines such as "Mad Dentist Yanks Girl's Tongue" and "Skydiver Devoured by Starving Birds." He goes to Hollywood with Paul Newman to make his novel A Hall of Mirrors into an apparently bad movie called WUSA. I've never seen it, have you? He introduces us to Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and other works. I'm very grateful for the introduction because I've always been led to believe Kesey was a charlatan. Au contraire. Stone eulogizes his friend here as a great—if often drug-addled—man of superior learning and charisma. Kesey and his Merry Pranksters are probably most famous for setting off from Northern California in a psychedelic bus for the 1964 New York World's Fair. Neal Cassady was the driver. Yes, that Neal Cassady, Kerouac's friend, the one immortalized in On the Road. One tale of the Pranksters in Mexico—Kesey was on the run from drug charges—has Cassady clandestinely using a hypodermic to dose a roast pig with LSD and amphetamines, thus sending the many diners—Stone was one—on an unexpected journey. That LSD was originally intended as a Cold War weapon, coming out of CIA-funded studies at Stamford University, and ultimately became a popular drug which "changed the minds" of Baby Boomers and others in many ways during that time of heightened social consciousness, is an irony that resonates to this day. When Stone goes to Vietnam as a stringer, the narrative grows thin, the prose seems rushed, fragmented. But this is only in the last fifteen pages or so. The rest of the book is quite wonderful.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-01-20 00:00:00 Yvonne Smith Two things that will color my review of this: 1. I'm convinced I was born in the wrong decade. I am completely addicted to and fascinated by the '60s and '70s, to the point where it actually grieves me that I didn't live through them. 2. Within the first 10 pages, I knew that Robert Stone is the kind of guy that I would have fallen head over heels for had I existed in those times and ever met him. Maybe that's a weird thing to say, and that's honestly never happened to me while reading anything else before, but I can safely say that Robert Stone is my kind of guy. It seems to me that most of the people who weren't pleased with this were upset by one of two things (or both): the realization that this is not, in fact, another Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or memoir about Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and/or Stone's writing style, which is rather... fuzzy. This is a memoir of Stone's golden years, and he treats it as such. It's written in such a way that I can hear him telling these stories to me over a meal or a few drinks. It's a bit disjointed (but not jarringly so), and it's filled with the kind of details and retrospect that make hearing about the past so damn interesting. There are moments that are stronger than others, things that are skipped over. Everything is given the proper amount of time in accordance to its weight in his life. Nothing is overly romanticized or dramatized, just the things that probably were as they happened - sunsets in Mexico, the moment he decides to marry his wife, his experience in Vietnam. He looks back not with disappointment or exultation, not with emotions distorted by memory and time, but with respect and knowledge. His passion and excitement for these stories makes it seem as though he lived all of this just yesterday, but with the knowledge he possesses today. Because of this, it feels very honest. He's upfront about his mistakes and shortcomings and those of his comrades - he doesn't hesitate to show his mistakes with drugs or his relationships, and he admits that he thinks Kesey could've been a much more monumental figure than he was, which is a pretty bold thing to say about someone worshiped as cultishly as Kesey, especially considering the two were good friends. It's actually a little hard for me to imagine what Stone's fiction must be like, because he writes memory so well. The arc follows Stone on the wild goose chase of his life. Beginning in the Navy, it follows his early days as a war journalist and an NYC tabloid journalist, working blue collar jobs in New Orleans, writing his first novel (and seeing it turned into a movie), hanging out with Kesey and his gang (he wasn't on the entire famous bus journey, just the last few days in New York, but he did spend a lot of time with Kesey & Cassady, including their Mexican exile), living in California, London, NYC, and ending with his time in Vietnam. I rather liked that it started and ended with military service and was filled in-between with passion, debauchery, sensationalism, art and drugs. It gives him a rather grounded perspective on the era - he was clearly taken with its goals and attitudes, but not as completely as many of the decades' more famous figures. On the whole, a delightful read, particularly for those entranced by the times, for writers who like hearing about/from other writers, and for those on a true quest to live well.