Customer Reviews

I Think, Therefore Who Am I?: Memoir of a Psychedelic Year

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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.

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.

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!

This lucid memoir captures the hippie era of the sixties, the highs and lows of the psychedelic drug scene in New York City's East Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury during the "Summer of Love."

The author, conveying the shifting fortunes and mental state of his "acid head" narrator, recalls that scene and the young man he was with sardonic humor. His chronological yet nonlinear tale, covering the year 1967, is a pastiche of discrete, titled stories ("In the Realm of Mythunderstanding," "Beelzebub and His Sidekick," "The Eighth Street Commune," "Leo's Hexagram," "In Thought's Caboose"). It starts well and gets even better, as the various pieces mesh and the overall tale of transformation and disintegration moves toward its denouement with mounting dread. But the awareness that suffuses this memoir keeps it sharp and unsentimental, so that even as the protagonist loses his mind, his confusion is rarely solemn, but gritty, or hilarious, and sometimes both at the same time.

Indeed, as someone who experienced that era, I can say it was a roller coaster time when it seemed everyone was higher or lower than they'd ever been, and never one or the other for very long. For the former psychedelic drug user, or pothead, the sense of exhilaration and abject despair and paranoia will seem eerily accurate.

But finally, what most recommends this book to me, a serious reader, is how fluidly it moves, from transition to transition, through the interwoven stories about spiritual and pseudospiritual realities and assumptions, politics and the existential poetry of the moment, sex and sexuality, the grungy details of life and the daily dreams of transcendance. I highly recommend it.

I am a bad reader. I pick up books and never ever finish them. Famous books and books people love too. I just can't seem to get really pulled in unless I feel that the author knows something I don't, unless I feel that there is some secret I have been blind to hidden inside.

This is one of the few books that has lit up visions in my mind and led me through them. This is one of the first books to personally affect me in a long time.

I have an interest in this time period and I'm a young male living in New York City. Okay okay, so these factors I'm sure helped this book to be important to me.

So I have an interest in the culture of this time, the music and the literature and all good things like that. But I have never understood who the people were until now. This memoir is the first thing to bring a clear understanding to me of what things were then and how that is related to and relevant to right now. I cannot emphasize that enough.

I could say more things about it as a great representation of a time period, or as a uniquely well-written and engrossing memoir, but the real reason I drag myself to a computer to write a short review for you is that I was personally affected by it and I would want to pass it on to you so it could do the same for you.

Right? Right. Anyway you have a good day.

I confess, I'm known among my friends as pretty `earthy crunchy' - a hippie some would say. I'm sure that makes me predisposed to like this book. I can't say I was aware as in conscious of my surroundings the year this took place, I think it was 1967 - which would have made me an infant, so I can't or at least shouldn't comment as to its accurate depiction of a time, a decade I'm really truly sorry I missed. But I will say that "I Think" paints a vivid, freaky picture of good trips and some very bad, fetal-positioned trips, of little flower child angels and strung-out opportunistic devils, of innocent, trailblazing optimism and an inevitable harsh dawn.

The best memoirs are revelatory. For me, it can be difficult to read about even the most fascinating of external lives if the author's reactions, opinions aren't also there to engage. Here though, even a mysteriously self-flushing toilet is provocative: "Later, Tom told me it had something to do with water pressure and hydraulics, but the science of it could never be as appealing as the cosmic joke I took it as - the flushing toilet punctuating thought, snapping me back to the present and throwing my musings into perspective. Whenever it happened, I couldn't help but laugh, for it was uncanny, interrupting me at what always seemed the right moment. Clearly there was no such thing as a thought worth dwelling upon."

It's densely written, sometimes baroque even and that works well, feels like a journey through a black-lit, winding vine-laden, Fillmore poster. The effect is heady, subversive, sweet. And ultimately a little sad as in here, where a prescient friend ponders the double-edged sword of hippie philosophy: "Remember how liberating it once was, to realize that nothing matters? That the past doesn't have to inhibit us? That only the moment exists, and everything seems possible? But now, that thought, which pops into my head all the time - that nothing matters - it leaves me deflated wherever I am, whatever I'm doing.... It tells me there's no reason to care, about anything."

I recommend it highly. It's an absorbing, well-wrought memorial that doesn't glorify the time, as so many books on the topic do, but faithfully and compassionately describes what it was really like (I suspect)... forgoes the too-familiar, swirling sheen of popular 60s nostalgia. And with that I think I'll leave off - I hear a toilet flushing.

...And I am rarely reading less than three books at a time. "I Think, Therefore Who Am I?" was a great way to learn more about the period often referred to as 'the sixties' (although it is often the late sixties and early seventies that people are referring to.)
Most importantly, I have never felt so emotionally connected to a character before. Once, I was actually getting upset (and had to stop reading to calm myself down) because the main character was in an upsetting situation. At another point in the book I even laughed out loud after reading one sentence that struck me as so true it was amazing. This is a book I will read again and again. I highly recommend it and have given it to friends as a gift.

Psychedelic experience is purely experiential. It dwarfs - obliterates - language and even the best visual evocations are only a faint reminder. True flashback triggers are random: a smell, a taste, a brief flicker of the beyond beyond.

But a firsthand account that is neither dismissive of the epiphanic intensity of psychedelic rapture nor bitter that Eden later eluded us again is so very rare and precious. That such an account would languish in obscurity while books like Robert Stone's "Prime Green" or Grace Slick's atrocious memoir sell thousands of copies is a great injustice, but anyway... "I Think, Therefore, Who Am I" is staggeringly vibrant and immediate, with a revolving door of characters - the dealer of ambrosia who appears of almost mythological stature, the lowlife hangers-on that by and by resort to the far dirtier high of amphetamines, the lithe mural-painting hippy gals, the square friends he turns on with varied outcomes... and, ultimately, the disenchantment accompanying the realization that if you storm heaven you'll sometimes get catapaulted deeper into the subbasements of hell than you ever imagined, though a lesson is to be taken, even from there.

This book isn't really about the sixties; it isn't historical in any sort of specific or latitudinal way. It's an account of a radical, accelerated transformative journey precipitated by psychedelics as it happened to be the case with so many then. Weissman remembers. It was not a dream, not a delusion, chaotic and sometimes blinding as it was. He doesn't downplay the significance of what went on like so many memoirists of the time (which is tragic, because for many who did not take it as a starting point for seeking a higher consciousness, it was most likely the most real thing they ever experienced). Naturally there is a pittance of bittersweet nostalgia, but it's all beautifully and generously expressed. One of my favorite memoirs ever!

I was there, in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, during the so-called Summer of Love (the title of one of the chapters), and know people who were in the book's other main locale: New York's East Village. This book truly captures the time and place, as well as the generational--and the the LSD--state of mind. It's all here, the euphoria and depredation, the sense of expectation and disappointment, the humor and tragedy of that era. This a remarkable memoir, a noncelebrity, down-to-earth, lyrical portrait of the times. I highly recommend it.

The sixties--1967 is the year revisited in this book--was existential ground zero for the protagonist and his (our) generation. No surprise, then, to relive with him the psychedelic debates about the difference between truth and fact, acceptance and toleration. And for balance, to be reminded that we were no less benighted than any other generation coming of age, absolutely sure of itself; deriding, in this book, a goal-oriented society while striving for nirvana. The author uses these contradictions to undercut the essential, profound seriousness of his memoir, which at times is funniest when it's most sad.

It's been said, too often, that if you remember the sixties, you didn't truly experience them. But then, self-examination has never been a staple of popular culture, which feasts on glib sayings. Clearly, the author has been rethinking that past in order to get it right. And he has succeeded. Like him, the characters in his book turned on and tuned out during a brief, spectacular, and ultimately crushing and elucidating historical moment that they surely remember--if they survived it. A memoir, for them; a heady trip for anyone else.