Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America : William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, - Hardcover

Whitmer, Peter O.; Vanwyngarden, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0026276704 ISBN 13: 9780026276702

Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1987

Synopsis

Examines America in the sixties through the works of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Mailer, Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Leary, and Robins

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Clinical psychologist Whitmer invites readers on a trip down memory lane via interviews with '60s-era mavericks. Psychologist Timothy Leary, whose LSD experiments at Harvard spilled over from the lab into his private life, poet Allen Ginsberg, and writers William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, Tom Robbins and Hunter S. Thompson reveal the serendipitous nature of their encounters with one another, their clashes with the law and the establishment, bouts of drug abuse, and the relationship between the psychedelic experience and their creativity. Depicted is a 1982 poetry reading by Ginsberg, the audience divided between long-haired '60s devotees and '80s preppies on a class assignment that Whitmer likens to "spending a day at Peabody Museum looking at pre-Columbian basket weaving for Anthro 1-A." His self-indulgent prose, where substance is sacrificed for jazziness, fails to transmit across the generation gap the magic and urgency of the '60s revolution. Photos not seen by PW. (July
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

By combining interviews with complementary background information, Whitmer offers fascinating though uneven views of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, Tom Robbins, and Hunter S. Thompson. While it is impossible to fully explain "the finger-snap change of a generation of dull caterpillars into a nation of gaudy butterflies," Whitmer does help us better understand these seven interwoven lives and how they affected each other and society. The book is fleshed out with chapters on the Esalen Institute, Berkeley in the Sixties, and the recent commune experience of Rajneeshpuram. Not a scholarly work, but a compelling one. Photos not seen. Rebecca Sturm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0026276704
• ISBN 13: 9780026276702
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260