![]() ![]() I was hoping to love Inherent Vice, another Pynchonesque psychedelic romp through California in the Sixties, but it's basically a hippie noir with really funky characters. It's also not as wild, dense, and layered as The Crying of Lot 49, which I loved. Many of his fans describe this as "Pynchon Lite." It's certainly nowhere near the length of his weightier classics like V. Despite that, he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy", except that this one usually leads to trouble. ![]() ![]() Suddenly, out of nowhere, she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. ![]() It's been awhile since Doc has seen his ex-girlfriend. Private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() Is this a vision from God? Or a human-made disruption of nature? Of both?įollowing The Lacuna (2009), a novelization of the relationship between artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Mexico, Barbara Kingsolver explores the life of Dellarobia Turnbow in Flight Behavior(2012), as Kingsolver explains: Except there is no fire, only a billow of orange spread out beneath her. The hike is taxing-she struggles without her glasses (left behind out of vanity) and with her incessant craving for a cigarette-but before she meets her would-be young lover, she encounters what appears to be the entire valley below her in flames. ![]() Years later, living on the farm owned by her in-laws and now the mother of two children, she walks up a mountain on that land to a rendezvous with adultery. A young woman in the Appalachian hills of the rural South finds herself pregnant far too young and marries her high school sweetheart, only to lose the child. ![]() ![]() Readers will enjoy his breezy and often tongue-in-cheek style, making this anything but a dry trudge.Īllen covers all the highlights of the years 1919 through 1929, among them the incapacitated years of Woodrow Wilson, the scandal-plagued presidency of Warren G. Frederick Lewis Allen worked as a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, later, in 1941, assuming the position of editor-in-chief. ![]() Only Yesterday is a contemporaneous history published two years after the 1929 stock market crash, as well as shortly after the Florida Land Bubble bust that began in 1925 (and is argued to be the precipitating cause of the Great Depression by Christopher Knowlton in his recent book, Bubble in the Sun). ![]() Read it for yourself to see the truth in this. Errors made then are still being made today. Those new to Only Yesterday will only have to read a few chapters to see how true these statements are, because the parallels between the 1920s and current times are numerous. Consequently, we repeat mistakes over and over again. ![]() Not just people today, but people throughout history have ignored the lessons taught by events preceding them. History teaches many lessons but people are bad pupils. ![]() |