Customer Reviews

Portraits From Memory : New Orleans In The Sixties

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What a wonderful surprise to find this beautiful book while searching the internet for information on New Orleans during the period I lived there, 1970-72. I am writing a memoir about the Sixties, and this book is a real gem. Of course, I knew Darlene Fife, the author of "Portraits from Memory," and Robert Head as publishers of the notorious "NOLA Express" bimonthly, but I was a political radical and kept my distance from the counterculture. Reading Darlene's memoir, I realized how truly radical she and the paper were, and also remembered how supportive they were to me, however unappreciative I was at the time. I recommend the book to anyone who cares about literature, free speech, the sixties and the undereground press, early environmentalism, New Orleans, the nuts and bolts of community organizing, and anyone who appreciates a beautifully produced book from a small regional press that deserves support.

Darlene Fife's new book "Portraits from Memory: New Orleans in the Sixties" in a Memoir in the finest sense of the word. It is refreshing to read someone who is so self-deprecatingly honest about her own feelings and thoughts during the time she was Editor of one of the most important "underground newspapers" in America. This is not a "history" book filled with data, facts and figures striving to make a past time more understandable. The book is a series of connected written snapshots of a Time and Place, highlighting some of the people that the author grew and evolved with. It does not matter if you think that the people portrayed in this book are multi-manically insane, depraved drug addicts, dangerous political operatives, or sainted hipsters. The strongly held beliefs and political passions of all of the characters shines through the writing. There were "cells" like Darlene's operating all over during the sixties, one wonders how candidly other writers would deal with theirs.

The alarm sounded by babes just learning about life - The continued energy that was necessary to actually protest our involvement in Vietnam in a way that helped make the American people aware of what we were really doing while at the same time living, loving, searching, finding. This is life in the trenches comittment and FUN -The pictures - that's how it was -The cartoons - A brisk slap that says question question question -Honoring the lode stone within Bob's what's interesting - important to me now and in that there's a lesson for us all- The clearest moves come spontaneous for those with the courage to honor their way of thinking instead of buying the - this is the way it is - farm It's a little history that paints a clearer picture than most. It belongs on a lot of shelves.

How surprised I was in searching for items regarding Jim DeGraff that I found this book, how funny it is to see Clarks name in print. I was one of those with Good News and have several copies of it and NOLA Express, artifacts of my past, haven't read this book yet but have ordered and am looking forward to reading it.

It is the issues brought up in Fife's memoir which current publications are often bursting with haste to bury: war, the social impact of art, the mixing of art and social reality, how individuals can have influence on their locale and their times. Each and every one of these themes, as well as other illuminated briefly in Fife's text, are what most readers will not find readily available at their local newsstands and megalithic bookstores. Fife concerns herself with true grassroots publication: the story of one journal. It is fitting that another press, grassroots and from the same region, would publish a text honoring its literary parent. It is honorable and rare that such a press would do so just when we need to remember this history and just when corporate publishing is so intent on forgetting.

Let's see: A materialistic, smugly self-satisfied culture, spying on its own citizens; a nation stuck in a useless war; young people searching for meaning in a culture that discourages non-conformity. Sound familiar? It should because that was then (the period of this book) and NOW. Everything recounted in this book has a current parallel and after reading it, you will ask, as I did: Why haven't we, as a nation, learned anything? This is recommended for any Gen X and Y folks who have been brainwashed into thinking the 60s Counterculture was some kind of error or mistake. Read, Learn, Act!