--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Robert Gimbel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > (snip) > > There doesn't seem any particular reason for Lapham publishing this book at this time. It can be read in an hour or two and does not press any claim for relevance. Which is nice, in a way. What the book does best is re-create, as if it were a time capsule, a cultural moment that will never be repeated, a kind of last hurrah of credulity and a first hurrah of the corporatised celebrity-power we live amid today. > > "The scene retains its force," Lapham writes, "because I now know that it occurs at almost the precise moment, late February 1968, at which the flood tide of generous thought and optimistic feeling that formed the promise of the 1960s turns on the ebb ... Another 20 months and the Beatles were no longer together as a band, President Richard M. Nixon was in the White House with his 'madman theory' of geopolitics, and cocaine was outselling marijuana on the markets in transcendence."
Reviews like this one are almost always written by someone who wasn't there and wishes he had been. My personal feeling for the "turning point" of those times was that the pivotal point was in early 1967, and that everything else was downhill from there. All the rest -- the Beatles with Maharishi, the commer- cialization of hippie, the free love stuff -- all of that was an attempt to capture a fleeting taste of a phenmomenon that was already over. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Join modern day disciples reach the disfigured and poor with hope and healing http://us.click.yahoo.com/lMct6A/Vp3LAA/i1hLAA/UlWolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
