Dream Time [Paperback]

Geoffrey O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 28, 2002

Sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll: the exhilarating but deranging American 1960's, captured in a classic.

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.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Geoffrey O'Brien is the editor-in-chief of the Library of America and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is a widely published poet, critic, editor, and cultural historian and has been honored with a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (May 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582431914
• ISBN-13: 978-1582431918
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,806,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars came out of nowhere, November 11, 2008

By 

eibzion "eibzion" (minneapolis, mn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dream Time (Paperback)

I borrowed this book from a friend who had never read it. It seemed to come out of nowhere - had never heard of the author, never heard of the book, but I read the first chapter and was intrigued. I really had no idea where the book was going, but by the midway point I was pretty sure it was one of the best books I'd ever read.

Since I didn't grow up in the 60's, I can't really say how "accurate" his portrayal of it is, but I do know that it is the most poetic and true sounding description of the decade I've ever read. It's difficult to describe what the book is really about; part memoir, part novel, part criticism, he addresses the shortcomings of the decade by writing about its dreams. And sometimes you don't really know what he's talking about: he's describing the halo around the image, and in doing so portrays the image more clearly than had he just gone straight to it.

Despite the difference in style and form, Dream Time reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But O'Brien captures a sympathy and a tenderness that Thompson didn't. While both works deal with the American Dream (and the American nightmare), I prefer O'Brien's genuine voice to Thompson's gonzo-irony. However, the books do make an interesting companion piece and I would recommend that they be read in pairs.

All in all, Dream Time is an excellent book. I wished for a bit more in the ending, but the body of the work more than makes up for it. Definitely worth a second read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars back in print!, June 8, 2006

By 

E. FOX - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dream Time (Paperback)

This is a terrific book, and I am delighted that it is back in print. He nails down the elusive spirit of the sixties with a precision I have never encountered before.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars poetic and wise, January 21, 2010

By 

M. FUSCO "yawnmower" (NEW YORK, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Dream Time: Chapters From the Sixties (Hardcover)

Literary impressionism of what is was like to grow up in the 50's and 60's. Mr. O'Brien is a writer of great skill and political acumen.

The best essays ever written on the subject.