Robert Stone at Cody's Books January 25, 2007

ROBERT STONE delivers PRIME GREEN: Remembering the Sixties. Robert Stone has written some of the most iconic American fiction of the last three decades. The legacy of the “burnt-out ‘60s” – Vietnam, drugs, the failure of counter-culture dreams – has informed much of his best work, not least of all his National Book Award-winning novel Dog Soldiers. In PRIME GREEN, his first ever book-length work of non-fiction, Stone offers a candid memoir that recalls his own extraordinary experiences during the most turbulent, yet magical, decade in our history. In 1958, Stone is in the Navy, circumnavigating the globe on a transport ship. Ten years later, he would encounter a different kind of military engagement, as he witnessed the disastrous invasion of Laos as a correspondent in Vietnam. In between, he would alight in New York amid the burgeoning art scene on the Lower East Side, in New Orleans where jazz and poetry fused in Beat-inspired clubs, and in California, where he joined the Age of Psychedelia, experimenting with LDS along with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and an up-and-coming band called The Grateful Dead. Stone’s personal take on the Sixties as he lived it is indelible, capturing those heady times with both hindsight and insight. “Opening the trunk on the American Sixties might seem at first to be a fearsome, even a rueful, undertaking, “ says Richard Ford. “However, the incomparable novelist Robert Stone is obviously destiny’s choice for the role of narrator-guide…he writes with unnostalgic compassion and intelligence for that tumultuous time, now surprisingly low on our horizon, but that by some necromancy of history has presented us with all we see around us today.” 7:00 PM at Cody’s Fourth Street, Berkeley

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