Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000
by Martin Torgoff
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Book Summary Information
Author: Martin TorgoffEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-05-03
ISBN: 0743230116
Number of pages: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Book Reviews of Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000
Book Review: Brutally Honest Look at the American Drug Culture!!
Summary: 5 Stars
A highly entertaining academic work that attempts to bust out of the classroom. With using the authors lifeline as the 1945-2000 period choice, to his interview with a true-life unrepentant lifelong drug user, to even sprinkling his personal experiences with illicit treats, the author makes the myriad of information accessible to us all. Can't Find My Way Home covers the whole of drug usage and combines, or rather, mirrors the various regions and times of America with the variable popular culture of music, film, art and literature. What did Charlie Parker like to take with his Heroin? What was Andy Warhol and the Chelsea Girls drug of choice. How much did cocaine abuse affect the making of Scarface? These and all kinds of delicious tid-bits are woven throughout this powerful and entertaining tome!!PILATE: A Brutal Bible Tale
Summary of Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000
From the narcotic allure of the bebop and Beat generations to the psychedelic 1960s, Vietnam, the cocaine-fueled disco era, the crack epidemic, and the ecstasy-induced rave culture, illegal drugs have profoundly shaped America's cultural landscape. In Can't Find My Way Home, journalist and filmmaker Martin Torgoff chronicles what a long strange trip it's been as the American Century became the Great Stoned Age.Weaving together first-person accounts and historical background, Can't Find My Way Home is a narrative vast in scope yet rich in intimate detail. Torgoff tells the stories of those whose lives became synonymous with the drug culture, from Charlie Parker, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John Belushi to ordinary people who felt their consciousness "expanded" or who plumbed the depths of addiction. He also examines the broader impact of drugs on society and politics, from the war on drugs to the recovery movement, and the continuing debate over drug policy. A vivid work of cultural history that neither demonizes nor romanticizes its subject, Can't Find My Way Home is a provocative and fascinating look at how drugs have entered the American mainstream.
Martin Torgoff came of age just about the same time as the drug boom, a circumstance that informs his overview of America's "Great Stoned Age." Chronicling the irrepressible onslaught of mind-altering substances from the end of World War II through the close of the century, Torgoff (whose previous publishing efforts have centered around rockers Elvis Presley and John Cougar Mellencamp) intersperses the personal with the historical. Laying the groundwork with his own recollections of indulgence beginning in the late 1960s, the author flashes back to the Beat era, which he asserts opened the door for all that followed. Interviews with the obscure and celebrated add color and detail to the chronicle. Here's Herbert Huncke, the unapologetic hustler and heroin addict who lurked on the periphery of '50s bohemian scene and turned up as a character in William Burroughs' pulp memoir Junkie. Into the 1960s, there's acid guru Timothy Leary, poet Allan Ginsburg, record producer Paul Rothchild, Woodstock MC Wavy Gravy, and others caught up in a wave of revolutionary experimentation and excess. The '70s leads to the cocaine craze (embodied here by party girl Suzie Ryan), which begets drug wars (with plenty of casualties on both sides), Just Say No, the crack epidemic, and rave culture. While Torgoff's tome is too capricious to serve as the final word on America's drug obsession, it's eminently readable and entertaining, thanks to its expansive, pop-culture-informed tone. There's an almost insane momentum to this tale, with dozens of astonishing twists and turns. Imagine Jimmy Carter's drug czar, Dr. Peter Bourne, snorting cocaine at a party thrown the by pot legalization group NORML. Then picture George H.W. Bush's point man on drugs, William Bennett, remarking in an interview that it would be "morally plausible" to behead drug dealers. So much for moderation. --Steven Stolder
1945 - Present Books
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