Ed Sanders (1) (1939–)

I always understood that journalists should never insert themselves into the stories they cover. Ed Sanders commits that sin as a matter of course in this history of the Manson family. In defense of Mr. Sanders, who better than himself, by any measure a paragon of human decency as well as a one-man iconographic history of the counterculture during much of the last fifty years in the United States, to relate this story subjectively?

Unfortunately, the book is rife with lapses in style, repetitions, and indulgence in dubious and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, which compromise its credibility. This is mostly due, I expect, to lazy editing. But don’t authors read galleys? I think that was a step passed over here.

For the record, Mr. Sanders may count me among his ardent fans: I loved “Tales of Beatnik Glory” and still listen to The Fugs.… (mere)

Ed Sanders’s mock-heroic (and heroic) odyssey follows poet, filmmaker, and activist Sam Thomas, editor of Dope, Fucking, and Social Change, and a variegated cast of castoffs, dropouts, peaceniks, freakniks, and mendicant filthniks, from Kansas through the beatnik and hippie countercultures of New York City’s Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. From the Freedom Rides and confrontations with the Alabama Klan to the “hate-dappled” Summer of Love, Tales of Beatnik Glory is the epic of America in the sixties, in a language of droll invention and stoned mythopoesis, from a man who once dared to exorcise the Pentagon.… (mere)