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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
unflinching, tender, surprisingly universal, July 21, 2008
This review is from: I Think, Therefore Who Am I?: Memoir of a Psychedelic Year (Paperback)
Although I wasn't there myself, I'm pretty sure this book is one of the most vivid, absorbing and true-to-life accounts out there of psychedelic hippy life in the late 60's East Village (with bits of Haight Ashbury). But the historical details (and the drugs - plenty of them) are a small part of the pleasure of reading (and re-reading) this memoir/novel. It's the perceptions of the human emotion - the uncertainty, anxiety, and occasional moments of almost mythic connection and becoming - that make this book so compelling and universal. Being young, on your own, a little lost and perhaps hungry, but with a pocket of pills and the address of the pad at which some friends are crashing, never sounded like so much fun or so much like the fundamental human predicament.
The gestures, the little turns of phrase or cheek or leg are so intimate, sometimes you feel almost like a spy, looking out from behind Peter's glasses as he weaves through a maze of tenement hallways, turn-ons and near misses. The most unforgettable for me were the coming-of-age epiphanies, including the first time on acid and the first time.... not to mention the down moments, sudden realizations of total directionlessness, or of homesickness for a for a temporary home you had fled just days or weeks earlier. Books and movies are full of cookie-cutter or melodramatic portrayals of life moments like these, but seldom do we actually see or read what thoughtful, self-aware and imperfectly graceful people (i.e. most of us) actually think or feel at these moments. From an LSD-induced realization of 20-something mortality while wandering alone along Ave. A at dusk, to appreciating the silent coaching of a more experienced lover, "I think, therefore who am I" is full of unflinching but tender accounts of why we actually do what we do, and what it feels like.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A hippie with a memory for the details - how does he do it?, March 1, 2008
This review is from: I Think, Therefore Who Am I?: Memoir of a Psychedelic Year (Paperback)
Somehow, after all these years, Peter Weissman has managed to uncannily capture the texture, the rhythm and the dialogue of stoned young people living in NYC's East Village in 1967. At a time when books on the sixties have become more common as the protagonists reach their sixties, Weissman's work is unusual in depicting the life of an everyday hippie, not a Weatherman or a celebrity.
Anyone coming of age in the late sixties drug culture will recognize the daily characters and settings of Peter's hippie life with a sense of amazement - here they are again! While this is cast as a "coming of age" story, by the time Peter goes to California and returns, the drugs have overwhelmed any sense of growing up. Luckily, Weissman has a sense of humor, and I found myself laughing out loud again and again, which was good because, while the supporting cast goes through every kind of change, Peter himself seems to be heading in one direction, - from "a sorry scene... reminiscent of the thirties" in California to being "frozen in a particular purgatory" back East on his return, despite his recurrent hope that they're all on the brink of a new and more meaningful reality.
While the humor is wonderful, it's the epilogue which makes it work in the end. Since Weissman wrote the book we know he escaped with his brains intact, but it takes the epilogue for us to really believe it. As a sixty year old myself I loved the book and found it provided a rare and gritty assist to looking back and trying to make sense anew of those years. I highly recommend it to my peers and I can't help but suspect there's an audience as well among today's kids in their twenties.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Utterly Engaging, March 27, 2008
This review is from: I Think, Therefore Who Am I?: Memoir of a Psychedelic Year (Paperback)
Utterly engaging and one hell of a lot of fun, I found myself genuinely unable to put this book down. I am a fan of Kerouac, Tom Wolfe (both Tom Wolfes, in fact), and Hunter S., and to me this book contained scattered elements that recalled all those writers, yet Weissman's achievement stands distinctly apart from these others in style, subject, and form. I am a very, very slow reader, so I particularly loved how the story is broken up into manageable chapters, each one feeling complete and self-contained, yet fitting in perfectly with the whole book, scene transitioning to scene as 1967 unravels in a staggering rush. The people are real, compelling characters and the imagery is some of the brightest and most vivid I have ever read. A candle can't flicker and a beautiful girl can't blink in this book but that the reader is there also, seeing it happen. A very impressive book, I hope to see more from Weissman!
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