Souvenirs of a Blown World: Sketches for the Sixties, Writings about America, 1966-1973

Synopsis: Bestselling author of the Fletch series Gregory Mcdonald presents firsthand accounts of major events during the sixties and interviews with Joan Baez, Abbie Hoffman, Krishnamurti, Phil Ochs, Andy Warhol, and others. The year was 1966, and fresh off the heels of his controversial debut novel Running Scared, Mcdonald was hired to write for the Boston Globe with the instruction to "Go and have fun and write about it, and if you end up cut and bleeding on the sidewalk, call the office." Souvenirs of a Blown World is an exuberant account of the people, the encounters, and emotions that raced through the nation during those indelible years.
You will follow a war-battered young soldier through the steamy quagmire of Vietnam, attend a barbeque bash in Dallas for the opening of John Wayne’s two hundred and first picture, watch Jack Kerouac booze himself into hallucinatory eloquence, and run through the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Captured in kaleidoscopic prose, this is the vanished world of America’s revolt, the explosive second adolescence that shook old institutions to their foundations . . . the time we must relive and understand if we are to understand and live through our own.