The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties
Book review teaser from Jeff Kaliss
Here’s a brief teaser for a more substantial review of a weighty book with a long title: The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties. This third in a trilogy was written by Dennis McNally and published by Da Capo earlier this year. A few weeks later, the book’s launch was celebrated in a very well-attended event in Mill Valley, featuring author McNally in discussion with the Marin Independent-Journal’s Paul Liberatore and a reading of beat (aka bohemian) poetry by J.Macon King, editor of this publication.
There were many nodding, chuckling gray heads in that audience, including mine and a still attractive veteran of what in the day we might have called a hippie girl band, the Ace of Cups. It could be said — and I’ll be saying it later at greater length in these pages — that a commendable value of McNally’s latest book is its generous serving of sweet nostalgia for those of us whose then-young ears, eyes, and hearts were stimulated by the songs, poems, books, drugs, and activism which the tome recounts in considerable detail, particularly from the latter decades of the 20th Century.
We want to be able to cherish much of the bounty of creative artifacts from this time, as well as the aesthetic and ethical values, however much they may have become occluded by the infirmities of our aging and the moral pandemic currently gripping our politics and culture. Also noteworthy is the arduous research with which McNally supports his storytelling. Whether or not he succeeds in illuminating the causal historical evolution implied in his subtitle is open to question, but any shortcomings there are more than made up for in the delightful revelations he shares, for example, Jerry Gracia’s studies at the San Francisco Art Institute.
McNally’s long strange trip from cover to cover is well worth the time it will take you, and worth my putting more time into a review of it, a little further down the road.
Also see:
McNally Book Release Celebration Continued Beyond
and