Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III
By Robert Greenfield. (Thomas Dunne Books, 288 pages, $25.99.)
It's hard to examine the cultural revolution of the 1960s and make it dull, but Robert Greenfield has done it here. Greenfield's biography of Augustus Stanley — the chemist who supplied LSD to San Francisco hippies in the "Summer of Love" era — is full of detail but sorely lacking in context. The book piles up mundane facts about its subject; however, it sheds little light on the times and the place in which he lived.
Stanley made millions selling LSD when it was still legal, yet we're told virtually nothing about his efforts except a bare comment that he went to the library and taught himself the chemistry needed to do it. He was friendly with the Grateful Dead and served briefly as their manager and, later, as their sound engineer. Unfortunately, the second half of the book is overly dependent on Stanley's ideas about designing the perfect sound system, burdened with his ruminations on circuits and amplifiers and how nobody else understood these things as well as he did.
Stanley comes across as an interesting and intelligent crank, but really no more of an interesting crank than many we've all met in our lives. He just happened to run with a crowd that became notorious: the Dead, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and other towering figures of '60s counterculture. But this book fails to bring those characters to life, or to provide the sweep that would raise Stanley's life story beyond the tale of an admittedly talented eccentric.
Deadheads will probably enjoy it, but for the general reader of history, it's shallow and unsatisfying.
JOHN REINAN
The Party Wall By Catherine Leroux, translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler. (Biblioasis, 248 pages, $14.95.)
Layer by layer, the story lines thicken and entwine in "The Party Wall," an exquisitely told tale of family relationships built and broken. Characters emerge two by two, with nothing in common at first: young sisters on a walk in Georgia, an estranged mother and son in New Brunswick, a power couple in Toronto, a brother and sister at their mother's bedside in San Francisco.
Chapter by chapter, they start connecting in surprising and sometimes tragic ways. Mother and son are drawn closer in crisis. Brother and sister see their identities shaken to the core. The power couple learn a secret that will undo them. The sisters mysteriously touch all the rest.
No spoilers here. You just have to read it. Quebec novelist Catherine Leroux draws some of her inspiration from real-life events. She achieves in words what others do in pictures. This scene, for instance, seems straight out of one of Edward Hopper's lonely paintings: "They are once again mother and son sharing breakfast with their noses buried in newspapers, moving silently through the morning, living without looking at each other."
Leroux wrote in French, so some credit has to go to translator Lazer Lederhendler. Together they have woven a haunting piece that makes one hunger for more works by this writer to find their way into English.
MAUREEN MCCARTHY
