Chasing Shadows: Memoirs of a Sixties Survivor

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From Publishers Weekly
As a college student in the 1960s, Wilcox determined to experience everything?"become a cricket or an oak tree," "argue with the moon," live "life's mystery." To his working-class parents in Iowa, however, his desire to be a poet meant he must be crazy, and they sent him to psychiatric hospitals for observation, pills and shock treatments. Eventually he left Iowa and began chasing shadows, first in San Francisco and then in Manhattan, where he lived a hand-to-mouth existence on the Lower East Side with hippies, junkies, winos and various wayward girlfriends. Wilcox (Uncommon Martyrs: How the Berrigans & Friends Are Turning Swords into Plowshares) impressionistically describes his frenetic life on the streets of New York City, the characters he met there and his unsuccessful attempts to hold down odd jobs. Interspersed are harrowing accounts of his experiences in mental institutions and scathing outbursts of resentment toward his mother. In the last chapter, he comes to terms with, and almost forgives, his parents, but the end is a letdown; the heart of this funny, sensitive and disquieting book is in Wilcox's depiction of the angry, manic world of the '60s.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A casualty of the conformist 1950s, Wilcox landed in a mental hospital after he rebelled against the mores of his home and community. Upon his release, he moved to New York's Lower East Side, an area about to transform itself into a mecca for the Beat and hippie movements. Here, Wilcox began his personal season in hell as he battled hunger, homelessness, alcoholism, and drug pushers while attempting to pursue his dream of becoming a poet. His grim odyssey unfolds against the historical realities of the 1960s?the Civil Rights movement, the Kennedy assassination, and the Vietnam War. Although Wilcox escaped the pitfalls of the Bowery and Tomkins Square Park, the trauma that drove him there remains everpresent in this painful memoir. Recommended for readers interested in exploring the darker side of the Beat generation.?William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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