Dream Time - Softcover

O'Brien, Geoffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582431914 ISBN 13: 9781582431918

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2002

Synopsis

Dazzling, innovative, and courageous, Dream Time plunges the reader deep into the sensibility of the '60's in a wonderful display of cultural archaeology. Far from being an unqualified celebration of the era, it is a deliberate experiment, combining the genres of memoir, novel, and cultural history in order to convey the complex impact of the late '60's counterculture. When Dream Time was published in 1988, it won Geoffrey O'Brien a Whiting Writer's Award. Previous books on the subject had focused primarily on media icons such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, or Andy Warhol; Dream Time shifts the focus to the ways in which the psychedelic and countercultural currents of the era played themselves out in younger and more marginal lives. If you lived it, but never really came to grips with it; if you missed it but wish you hadn't--this is the book that tells it, at last, like it really was.

About this title

About the Author:

Geoffrey O'Brien is the author of Floating City: Selected Poems 1978-1995, The Phantom Empire, Dream Time, and other books. Executive editor of The Library of America, he also edited The Reader's Catalog.

From Publishers Weekly:

O'Brien's kaleidoscopic portrayal of the cultural and political ferment of the 1960s is framed in a style at once oracular, lyrical, impressionistic and ironic: "You parachute into a country without maps"; "The television was an open funnel, with its other end stuck in the middle of everything." Overheated and overintellectualized, these 13 vignettes nevertheless succeed in filtering out the decade's real promise from its false hopes and dead ends. O'Brien, author of Hard-Boiled America, evokes complacent suburbanites, pseudorebellious youth, the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy, hippies, "Camelot" politicians, Maoists and film critics. He paints U.S. politics as an arena where the two major parties had become little more than "rival PR firms." Even as he derides the excesses, he rethinks the certitudes and retraces the experimental forays of an adventurous decade.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1582431914
• ISBN 13: 9781582431918
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208