Robert Stone's "Prime Green"

It was the subtitle of this autobiography that caught my eye: Remembering the Sixties.

The book didn't deliver. It was a satisfactory autobiography, but it didn't give any insight into the 1960s. The bits he talked about were drug experiences with other artists. Something I don't relate to. So for me this book was a bust.

He recounts a tale of being a Johnny-Come-Lately reporter in Vietnam in 1971. But nothing significant was reported by him. Instead he indulged in drugs in various locations.

The section where he talks of the first moon walk is strangely indifferent to the event itself. He mentions it in passing as he recounts a hike through mountains south of San Francisco.

He mentions the two Kennedy assassinations but has nothing to tell. He darkly mentions "riots" in the US but goes into no details.

In short, there wasn't much "sixties" in this book about "remembering the sixties".

He mentions cheating on his wife, but doesn't go into details. He mentions his wife but she is merely a name that drifts in the background. (But I suspect she is the steady breadwinner who kept him and the two kids alive while he futzed around with his writing "career".) His mother raised him as a single mother, but once he leaves for the Navy at the age of 17 we hear nothing more about her.

What he does give testimony to was the self indulgence of the 1960s and the mad drug culture. He mentions friends that die without stopping to weight their life or even comment on the tragedy of a life cut short. There is a cruel indifference to his family, the society about him, and the mad destructiveness around him. No moral qualms. No philosophical questions about purpose or meaning.

I did enjoy his recounting being on a naval research ship in the mid 1950s. I enjoyed his comments on working for a tabloid in New York City around 1960. I found some of his comments about Hollywood and his short stint trying to convert his first book into a screenplay. These vignettes made the book tolerable.

The biography he presents is one with no roots and no community, no history and no direction. I guess what he presents is a thoroughly "modern" life, but I read it as a tragedy and not as a satisfactory life.