Another Author's review--Thank you Richard--gotta read yours

Ten Years After the Future
Bill Samos
Reviewed by
Richard McClain
4 stars

My own experience of the 60s was shaped by southern California, that laid-back la-la-land where nothing seemed real and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was easy to relate to staggering around in the sand of Venice Beach.
If you can keep up with it, you’ll love Stamos’s phantasmagoric hallucinogenic vision of the 60s. It touches all the bases of the times. From the upper reaches of Oakland on the east side of San Francisco Bay, to Berkeley with scholars and drop-outs, to a strangely normal commune in Oregon, to the fearsome hell of Vietnam. Donna and Sally, opposites though sisters, are the tentpoles of the whirling, spinning, dizzying action. Author Stamos lovingly details the cutesy old-fashioned teen world that was torn asunder by the WAR. And he has no mercy on the characters he invents. As it should be.
Problem: it’s difficult to keep the characters straight, and it’s difficult to imagine the backdrops because the book seems like MOLL FLANDERS, never telling us enough of where we are to have a sense of place. BUT...the characters are real people, drawn from life and then caricatured enough to make them bigger than real people ever could be. Like any real picture of the 60s, it drips with blood, drugs, alcohol, stupid games, sex of all kinds and combinations.

Just put a bottle of scotch on the table. Use a small glass and sip it. Read this enormously energetic book and slip into the horrific world of the Vietnam War. How did we survive it?

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