Strange world of trying to make it in London in the 1960's...
929405
"in the theater" as two lads attempt life on no sleep no money and not enough drugs...Richard E Grant shows his  genius as he throws himself around
The British countryside in overcoat , plastic bags for boots and a lethal hangover...in search of more booze and
trying to stay one step ahead of horny old Uncle Monty who's country home the two boys have taken over for a weekend...
The dialogue alone is worth the price of admission
4251721
Not a promising title but I read a review of it that sounded very good.  Starts with first British entry into the area.  Not as good as I was led to expect, and author a bit shaky on his pre-1950s history, but very good thereafter.
3871927
If you were in your twenties in the sixties (as I was), and can't remember what it was like (as I can), this book will bring it all back.

If you weren't born yet in the sixties, and would like to visit there, not just read about it but actually GO there somehow to see what it was like in reality (whatever that is), this book is your time machine to take you there.

VD meant either syphilis or gonorrhea.  Aids hadn't been invented yet, and Herpes was just a dark cloud on the far horizon.  Hippies lived in communes and had free love and cheap pot.  Or perhaps it was free pot and cheap love.  (I'm not sure, as I never had either.)  Acid was not the opposite of alkali, but a ticket for a trip.  Also a type of guitar playing.  The only thing that could get in the way of a great sex life was your particular set of inhibitions, which you needed to shed as quickly as possible..  The only possible complication therefrom was pregnancy, and that could happen to only half of the population.

Alexandria Quartet author Lawrence Durrell (rhymes with girl) alleged that there were five sexes, not just the traditional two.  Gavin Arthur went him a few better and declared for twelve.  Hence this book.  (It's a circle that has been divided up like a clock face.)  If you had read the book and knew somebody else who did, one of the favorite sports of the time was figuring out what 'time' on the clock you were and they were and where you could safely consign other people you knew.  I was (and still am) somewhere between 11:10 and 11:15.  The person I discussed it with the most-- my wife at the time-- was pretty sure she was at exactly 5pm, though I disagreed.  (As far as I was concerned she was off the chart.)

I won't try to summarize the whole book, as that would take as long as the book itself.  Maybe longer.  I will only say that I found the theoretical stuff quite interesting, and the constant flow of anecdotes proving the author's points not just irrelevant but unsettling.

It's hard to read. (It would probably help to have at some illegal substances first.  I wouldn't know: I haven't tried that approach myself.)  But if you can light some incense, puff some occasional potpourri vapors over the pages, wear a flower in your hair, eat an Alice B. Toklas brownie or two, and just sort of let your brain go, you can get through it somehow, and be in the sixties, when everything was simple except the achievement of simultaneous orgasm.  And there were books to help with that, too.
3028321
I'm in complete agreement with the previous reviewer...while I enjoyed this book, I would have appreciated more comprehensive coverage of some of the lesser-known figures and incidents of the time.  In addition to this title and the aforementioned FAITHFULL, I'd highly recommend Mick Farren's GIVE THE ANARCHIST A CIGARETTE--an astonishingly vivid, articulate and hilarious portrait of the more bohemian/hippie end of late-'60s London.  There's also another London-in-the-'60s book I've been on the lookout for entitled DAYS IN THE LIFE by Jonathan Green.
3579261
I'd recommend this to anyone who remembers the 60's.  The author is very young, but has told this story as if she was there.  Beautiful writing style.  The second half of the book takes a strange turn into the future, which I didn't like when I was reading it, but understood when I was done.  Our book club gave it a solid 4 out of 5.
2819745
Saw this on PBS many years ago and remembered it to be better than it is. As a participant in that grand adventure during TET '68, I found it to be a little too far right for me, but the history is, for the most part, fairly accurate.
295025
Back in 1970 as an ex-Peace Corps Volunteer I traveled throughout Southeast Asia, hitchhiking where possible - Malaysia yes, Thailand no - and sleeping on the deck of a Thai boat making its way down the coast to  Malaysia - stopping at an island that easily could double for the one in  The Beach. Reading the book was thus eerie: in those days Vietnam was very  real, not a movie; and Southeast Asia wasn't a tourist destination other  than GIs on r and r. Interesting book. The interest in Vietnam - or movies  about Vietnam - by the central character shows that it hasn't been  forgotten. And the view of Southeast Asia in the book is at odds with my  memory of it - mysterious, beautiful, confounding. I guess that's why the  backpackers went looking for that pristine island. Again, an interesting  book that got me to thinking about a very interesting - and different -  time.
207060
As evidenced by its 779 narrative pages and its 13 pages of sources, LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY is a prodigious accomplishment by author and city resident Peter Ackroyd. And it did take me five weeks to read it.

Since I'd rather be in London than anywhere else, especially the Southern California I'm in, I began this volume with giddy anticipation. In his narrative of the city from pre-Roman times to the present, Ackroyd touches on the history of many of its diverse aspects: rivers, commerce, architecture, transport, theaters, street ballads, parks, food, weather, maps, neighborhoods, nationalities, fires, fog, pestilences, the effects of the Blitz, public lighting, law enforcement, sanitation and clubs. He also doesn't neglect London's unsavory side: alcoholism, gambling, blood sports, prisons, crime, the homeless, poverty, beggars, mob violence, racism, child labor, prostitution, overcrowding, the insane, slums, air and water pollution, and general squalor and filth. Because the author seemed (to me) so preoccupied with the latter dreary group, I suspect he's a closet social reformer.

LONDON isn't a riveting read. Surprisingly, I could put it down for such jolly pursuits as taking out the trash and cleaning the cats' litter box. Perhaps it's because the author's style, never leavened by any humor, becomes at times almost ponderous. For instance, in the chapter "How Many Miles to Babylon?", he comments:

"Yet there is one more salient aspect to this continual analogy of London with ancient civilisations: it is the fear, or hope, or expectation that this great imperial capital will in its turn fall into ruin. That is precisely the reason for London's association with pre-Christian cities; it, too, will revert to chaos and old night so that the condition of the 'primeval' past will also be that of the remote future. It represents the longing for oblivion... The vision is of a city unpeopled, and therefore free to be itself; stone endures, and, in this imagined future stone becomes a kind of god. Essentially it is a vision of the city as death. But it also represents the horror of London, and of its teeming life; it is a cry against its supposed unnaturalness, which can only be repudiated by a giant act of nature such as a deluge."

Good heavens, man! Get a grip!

I assume that the author loves his city, or he wouldn't have expended such enormous effort to tell its story. However, his affection is ofttimes difficult to infer, as when he writes:

"This is the horror of the city. It is blind to human need and human affection, its topography cruel and almost mindless in its brutality... The image is of a labyrinth which is constantly expanding, reaching outwards towards infinity. On the maps of England it is seen as a dark patch, or stain, spreading slowly but inexorably outwards."

LONDON provides a magnificent tapestry of information, and is a colossal achievement. However, until the last twenty-five or so pages, the author failed both to convince me that he derived any personal joy from residence in the city or to remind me why I love this place so much. Ackroyd's references to a city brutalizing, oppressing and dehumanizing its inhabitants are numerous to the point of being tiresome. Therefore, I finished the book admiring it much more than feeling good about it. Indeed, it wasn't until page 772 that I came across a statement (by Boswell) that struck a very personal emotional chord:

"I was full of rich imagination of London ... such as I could not explain to most people, but which I strongly feel and am ravished with. My blood glows and my mind is agitated with felicity."
3672921
The Lonely Londoners evokes a range of responses.  What seems at the start to be an amusing book soon proves to be a short, powerful read that challenges, educates and puts its readers through the emotional wringer at times.  For all the bold swagger of the first wave of (mainly) young men from the West Indies who sought their fortune in London and other UK cities in the early 1950s, life was tough, the weather foul and their reception by locals uncertain to say the least.  But they survived, with a style and charm all of their own, plus a colourful patois that tries very hard to camoflauge the rougher realities they also had to endure.  Sam Selvon's  mastery lies in the way his collected stories weave in on themselves, enlightening the reader as to what lies behind the brave faces shown to newcomers.
253908
The unnamed narrator of this debut novel emigrates to London, or Harare North, from Zimbabwe, where he served as one of President Mugabe's Green Bombers, the youth attack squads that terrorized the regime's opponents. He needs US$5000 to buy back his freedom from local officials, after he is caught beating up an opposition party official.

Upon his arrival in London, he is granted temporary asylum, but does not have working papers. After staying with a cousin and his wife, he moves in with a childhood friend living in an abandoned house in Brixton, along with several other countrymen trying to make it. He eventually obtains work in the underground industry, where the best paying jobs are held by BBCs, or British Buttock Cleaners, who look after "old people that poo their pants every hour". The daily internal and external stressors on the narrator and his housemates take a large toll on their physical and mental health, and each one is ultimately left to rely on himself to survive and to avoid a descent into crime or madness.

[Harare North] is a dark comedy that becomes a suffocating and dizzying ride that the reader takes along with the narrator, which gives an instructive glimpse into the lives of illegal immigrants living under the radar of the average city resident, whether in London or any other international city.
3550287
London, early 20th C., interesting period piece, pretty good writing and acting, high production values, maybe a little too obsessed with fashion
4437444
The book relates well to the 1960`s and a time when women were just starting to realize who they could be
4770488
It took a nimble mind with amazing organizational skills to write this tale. I played many of the video games mentioned, and listened to many of the '80's hits, so it was sort of a nostalgia trip as well as a futuristic story.
3197987
Interesting story set in the sixties.  Makes you aware, people have been crossing racial lines for
decades, even Asian men and Black women.  Some of the story seemed like filler, but over all a
very interesting story about love, barriers and family.
3417301
I liked it because I was born at the end of the 1920's in London England. Plus I am familiar with a lot of Cockney slang. Others might find it hard going.
4218986
I lived and worked in London from 1997-1998. As it turned out, I ended up finding a flat on Highbury Park Road in North London. Closest tube stop: Arsenal on the Picadilly Line.

I walked past the Grounds nearly everyday.

When I first mentioned my new neighborhood to my English workmates, they thought I was either mad, that I'd want to live so close to Highbury or lied to by an unscrupulous estate agent "yes, this neighborhood of Islington is quite leafy and quiet. In fact, Tony Blair lived here before he became PM!"

A friend suggested I check out "Fever Pitch" to find out a bit more about my neighborhood and the "Gooners."

Well, I had to say it was a great introduction for me into the life of an Arsenal supporter and live in the neighborhood. 1998 was the year they won the double (League & FA Cup) for only the 2nd time in their history. Incidentally, this was the first time in my life I had ever seen riot police & helicopters flying overhead shining lights down on the streets. Seemed a bit LA'ish!

I couldn't quite figure out why I was attracted to the neighborhood, nor why I so much liked the film, until I saw a newspaper article comparing the MLB Red Sox & Yankees to Arsenal & Manchester United (respectively). I finally realized that growing up in Boston, I had found my second home in North London!

Well, this review is more about my experience in London, but the film was a great part of that experience.
3799144
The book was interesting.  It gave a "bird's eye" view of London in the 60's and the people who were  a large part of that era. At times one felt pity for the author dealing with men who were so "addictive".  Other times it seemed a little self-serving.  For the most part it was enjoyable.  It helped me see some of the "rock personality" and how it could ruin the lives of the participant and their friends and family!