Customer Reviews

1968

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What a great book! Almost as good as Tales! The way it's all written, and the pictures he draws along with them, and all the emotion and experience were shoved into this book, mking for a great read. I DEFINITELY recommend this for anyone trying to find a concise and well written book about the hippes, yippies, Abbie, Ed, Jerry, Fugs, or anything else that went down during that great year. He writes about the Chicago and the Democratic Convention superbly!

I respect Ed Sanders, if for no other reason than Allen Ginsberg respected him. The concept of "Investigative Poetry" (which Sanders pioneered) is fascinating and worthwhile. That being said, this book is simply bad poetry and bad history.

What do I mean by "bad history"? I mean that this is slapdash, first-person recollection history with a minimum of cited sources. At least it makes no pretense to being a thorough history. At times it reads more like a Fugs concert chronology ("We played three nights here .... we went up to Seattle and did two gigs...", etc.). Now, had Sanders entitled it "A Fugs Eye View of 1968", we would have a more accurate volume.

"Bad poetry"? Let's face it, simply breaking up prose sentences into verse does not transform them into poetry. Throughout this work, the language is blase, trite, banal. Where's the freaking zest that characterized the very people and events this 'verse' explores?? Missing in action. This is the worst kind of boring, lifeless language, it comes nowhere near conveying this most explosive of years, and that's a real shame. Some will object to that assessment and label this work "accessible". Bollocks. It's simply mundane.

1968, and all the extraordinary people and tragic events that encapsulated the year, deserve so much more than Sanders manages to stitch together. Thankfully, we can always turn to a far better work; "1968: The Year That Rocked the World" by Mark Kurlansky. Now THAT'S history (and damn more poetic, as well).