Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties

The 1960s have been rehashed so often that it's hard for those who missed them to imagine the sense of change and possibility that so many felt. In this memoir, Stone manages to make those feelings palpable. He starts with a 1958 visit to South Africa as a navy journalist and ends with a 1971 trip to Vietnam, a civilian writer this time. In between, he ponders his fate, does hackwork, starts a family, takes drugs, writes some, travels, befriends Ken Kesey, and witnesses the beginning of what we now call the culture wars. As he revisits scenes from his own life, he extrapolates insight about the times and about himself and his artistic growth. His crystalline prose makes the project seem simple, but, of course, it's not; achingly honest and unself-serving, Stone fixes on different details and observes them differently. And whether readers have forgotten or never believed it, they'll finish the book thinking that things were really different then--without being forced to acknowledge that things were better then, too.

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