Customer Reviews

Long Time Gone

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In this masterfully woven tale of discovery and loss, Cal, a familiar young loner, sets out in search of a childhood friend gone `off the grid' during a time of turbulent social transformations. His quest takes him through the vast expanses of a racially charged United States in the 1970's. Leaving his hometown and the weighty humidity of the Mississippi River Valley his trail forces him to dive deep into the underground world of draft dodgers and radical activists. Cal takes readers on a path through the dizzying brightness of Florida's beaches and musty college crash pads of Boston where the young and naïve are trying to make sense of a changing world, often with cruel and harsh outcomes.

For younger readers, this story illuminates a specific time and captures the great awakening of American awareness and political engagement, its best intentions and unfortunate consequences. The sheer suspense and certainty of being part of a defining moment in history carries the reader through an emotional roller coaster. I was left asking myself `How did we get from there to here?' `Has consumerism vanquished our demands for justice?' `Where is the fire?' I recommend this book for anyone interested in gaining a more nuanced understanding of an exceptional era in U.S. culture and history.

Cal is a young man born during that indeterminate span of years between the last Depression-era babies and the first boomers. Adopted, seeking a moral compass, Cal abides by the small southern river town values of his best friends father--until the familys younger son leaves home and the father sends Cal to bring the youth back. Ive been riding along with Cal as his journey takes him to Daytona Beach, Boston, Chicago, and points west, sharing in his confusion as his perspective alters.

Long Time Gone is evocative and nuanced, moody and delicately lyrical. Partly paean to the varied land- and weather-scape, partly road trip a la Kesey or Kerouac, partly history lesson, partly mind trip, the protagonists growing awareness of what drives his friends, acquaintances, countrymen, lovers, and eventually, himself, resonates with me.

This book should be designated a national treasure! It is the best novel of the sixties I have ever read. The characters are so real, their beliefs and cause so moving, that I am reminded once again why that time changed all of us. Mr. Sanford knows what's he's doing - the written word is truly his calling. Fortunately, true passion in fiction is not dead. I will cherish Long Time Gone always!

The events of 1968 serve as the backdrop for this well-written but accessible novel about a young southerner looking for a missing friend and finding himself. Sanford takes his protagonist, a country dj named Cal, from a small-town Mississippi River town to springtime Daytona Beach, then up the East Coast to a Cambridge crash pad and a summer romance in Boston, and finally to the Chicago convention with a group of militant anti-war demonstrators. The chapters on the Chicago riots are especially well wrought, but every scene has the true feel of the 60s counterculture. Cal's search for the younger brother of his war-casualty best friend mirrors his personal quest for purpose and identity. A remarkable book.

Richard Sanford's Long Time Gone is a superbly written novel set in America's turbulent year of 1968. The search for a missing heir involves an unlikely cast, from the ghost of a best friend to a Buddhist from Detroit, to a girl-woman soulmate. A fictional memoir to the revolutionary changes of a bygone era, Long Time Gone is an enthralling and highly recommended tale, just the kind of novel that is so easy to pick up and so hard to put down!

A mesmerizing porthole into a time of turbulence and change. Readers cannot help but experience their own metamorphoses as they follow Cal's journey across America, through the sixties, and into himself. Sanford shows a true passion and genius for the art of fiction--for his fiction truly is art. Whether you choose to see the book as the story of an intriguing character finding his own space in time, or a road map through the altering perspective of a pivotal decade, you cannot help but be touched by the literary beauty that is Long Time Gone.