Customer Reviews

The Trip Into Milky Way

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4 star:		(1)
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This book was one of the most thrilling stories about a unique journey through life. The main character, Clay, has a huge disdain for authority. Not only does he dodge the draft in Vietnam, but he has a heroic stint in a Mexican prison. I loved his sarcastic attitude and the way he critiqued his surroundings. The book is so exciting that I found my fingers itching to turn pages. Even though it's a big book, it only took me three sessions to finish reading it.

"The Trip Into Milky Way" truly is a trip through time. Set in the 60's, we meet so many characters unique to that era. One of my favorites was Caroline, who he shares a passionate romance with on a picturesque beach. I could actually feel the sand in-between my toes through his mastery of imagery.

Clay's character is restless, innovative, independent and heroic. If you're looking for a good book with captivating dialogue, look no further.

The wonderful "Trip into the Milky Way" was such a blast from the past. I forgot how much fun and fear was involved in our young "baby-boomer" lives back in the late 60's-70's. This book is for anyone who loves a book "that you just can't put down".

This is a story that some readers today might find too incredible to be believed, even as fiction. However, it isn't. Instead, it's an extraordinarily exciting story of a man and his desires to be free and to be in love. Perhaps the most evocative part of this narrative are the descriptions of the Mexican prison Clay and his friends find themselves in. Seemingly doomed to a life in this hell, it becomes imperative that they figure out how to escape. Some do so by becoming someone else inside, others by doing drugs, and still others by actually risking escape and the high potential for death that risk involves.

If the counterculture was a generation's evocation of the rebellious aspect of the American psyche, then Clay is that generation's individual personification of the outlaw. Butch Cassidy and Huck Finn. Beat/counterculture antihero Neal Cassady and LSD chemist and propagandist Stanley Owsley. Indeed, the comparison to Owsley was brought home to me after reading a couple recent stories about Mr. Owsley in Rolling Stone and the San Francisco Chronicle. That medicine man to the acid generation lived his singular approach to life often unaware of the effects it might have on his closest friends. Clay does the same. Friendship and treachery, love and hate, avarice and aversion to the gold. Living outside and in opposition to the law yet we still look to the outlaw for their honesty of conviction. Didn't Bob Dylan sing in his song "Outlaw Blues:" "Don't ask me nothin' about nothin',/I just might tell you the truth?" Be careful because, as we all know, the truth is a rare phenomenon these days, with so many of our fellow humans preferring anything but.

The Trip Into Milky Way is a powerful and riveting epic tale of both an inward and outward journey. This masterfully crafted story draws you in and takes you on a rollercoaster ride through love, adventure, terror, suspense, the mystical and enlightenment. This book is so brilliantly and bravely crafted that you will find it very hard to put down once you've picked it up. It may just change your life.