Ah, the Circle Jerks I remember.
930432
A friend of mine had this cassette in high school, and I've been looking for it since, and it's just as good as I remember.  It's ashame the cd was so damn expensive, I would have rather had that.
593976
There were some personal situations in this true story that I could relate to as a pariah intellectual. When I was a kid, people were afraid I would grow up to have some kind of power that puts sands in the gears of slick sleight of hand. People who wanted to change anything confused me before I was able to come up with the stick that could beat them. If I enjoyed some upstick in this book, the tough guys were not getting whatever the goal of a social stick up had been planning.
588080
This story dragged me kicking and screaming back to the Jersey Shore of my youth.
I lived in Pt. Pleasant during this time. Then, we were all somewhat naive and innocent.
While we were all cheering on our teams, these kinds of things were happening all around us.
 Ritchings captures a time in our history when the illusion of decency was replaced with deceit.
I loved this book but miss my 50+ year old amnesia.
3240394
I remember five or six years ago when these guys, the New Atheists, were all the rage. I'm not sure whether it was because they brought any new ideas to the table or because one of them had a celebrity wife. In any case, it soon became apparent to me that were starting to sound a lot like the very people they were so smugly lampooning. I am an agnostic myself, so I have no particular dog in this fight, but I cannot help but recall the old Ascent of Man series from the 70's when Jacob Bronowski warned about those who would claim to have certain knowledge of the nature of ultimate reality - and in that particular episode he wasn't talking about religionists. The arrogance that leads to such claims is the subject that Mr. Echard Musgrave documents in this book, and it is well worth your attention.
464379
iT WAS WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR AT THE TIME............FAMILY ISSUES, SOME FUNNY MOMENTS
2203762
Way back when, back when I was a kid, these were the stories that I rushed down to the local drug store to buy after scrounging for old pop bottles to come up with the necessary 12 cents that would whisk me off into the 30th century. Geat stuff and a trip back to my youth.
3354691
I missed this one when I was young, I think in the 70's it was thought of as soft porn in my circle.  Well, it was a whole lot more than that.
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.
2933015
It came in a timely manner, and was an excellent price, but I remembered enoying it more than when I watched it as a kid. But I can't blame that on Amazon.
3441132
Like the first reviewer, I also read a copy of this book that I'd borrowed from the library back when I was in high school (in the mid-1970s).  I haven't read it since, so I don't know if the reviewer is right in warning that I might find it too chauvinistic today, but it definitely struck a cord with me back then.  I guess I'll leave my memories of it undisturbed for now.
1774101
When Richard Stratton decided to be an international hash and weed smuggler I was living and working for as a federal law clerk  in Miami. There was a time when the smugglers seemed like it was all in fun, like when two of our defendants John Darrell Boyd and Tracey Boyd were making gifts of shopping bags full of cash to the Jerry Lewis telethon, but that soon changed as the Colombians started taking over the drug trade. Instead of what passed for fun, we had shootouts and so many dead bodies the medical examiner rented a Burger King refrigerated trailer to handle the overflow.

So I have mixed emotions about this book. There were those, Stratton included apparently who were non-violent importers of "Square grouper" as floating bales of marijuana were called and hash. They were close to our age and lived large around Miami.

So I give this a 5 star rating because Stratton was a goofball and he writes well. I don't wish for those times back, there was too much heartbreak when smugglers were sentenced, when cops were corrupted, and some drug lawyers I knew and liked not only were disbarred, some were killed.

Everything has a price when you become an outlaw.
1785721
Being a teenager during the Vietnam War, this book brought back a lot of memories.  I clearly remember how poorly returning servicemen were treated.  I remember walking on my college campus, hearing the noon siren blow and seeing young men dive for cover.  I remember these hearings and  thinking how sad that these heroes were treated so poorly by their own over there too.  It was a dark time in American history.  It's a shame it took someone from another country to show us what we are capable of.  Thank you, Junie Moon, for the wake up call.
4044345
Certainly took me back.  Loads of useful memories.
4409384
I grew up and knew a few of the mentioned fellows, I remembered things a lot differently!
Of course we all know that being young and innocent we remember things as we saw then, through pink glass.
I Have GREAT memories for sure.
1556557
Some of these were spot on to ones I remember from a book of fairy tales I read as a child, others were very different takes on the same stories.  Some were much harsher than the ones I grew up with, and as an adult, I think I enjoyed them more because of it.
2687150
I pulled this down from my bookshelf the other day and re-read it and it brought back a flood of memories from fifteen years ago. I was chief engineer at a large TV company at the time and suffered a daily pestering by various "Y2K consultants" from the BBC et al. To a man (no ladies were stupid enough to be sucked in to that degree!) they were clearly riding a gravy train that they were going to suck dry! I'd upgraded every OS and bit of application software as per manufacturer recommendations but that wasn't enough - no sir!

"Is that combination door lock Y2k compliant?"
"No - it's a mechanical gadget that has no notion of the date"
"That's not good enough - if you guys are going to get BBC/Channel 4/etc etc millennium certification you're going to have to provide me with manufacturer documentation to show it is compliant"
Suffice to say we sailed through the 1999-2000 junction with no problems - I'd simulated it twice at the station (and once at my previous TV facility) - but that kind of level-headed thinking cut no mustard with the folks from the Y2k industry!

Anyhow - I noticed some interesting trends in the run up to 2000 - aside from the hundreds of books by doom-mongers like Mr Wiles (have these people ever been taken seriously since?) there were well defined attitudes in all the people who wanted the world to end by the close of 1999;

1. Once people had woken up to the fact that programmers had been addressing the issue for most of the nineties and databases are used to badly formatted input the danger turned to "embedded systems" - everything from your car's electronic ignition to nuclear missiles were going to go wrong. All the people I spoke to wouldn't accept the fact that most microcoontrollers know nothing about large time periods - your engine management operates over hundreds of milliseconds (or at most months for the service interval). The view of engineers who dealt with embedded controllers on a daily basis counted for nothing over the views of the doom merchants.
2. By mid-1998 it was fashionable for the Y2k industry to imply that although the USA would be OK all those stupid foreigner countries would cause the trouble - racism was everywhere! In the end Italy spent less than 1% of what the UK spent on Y2k preparedness and they suffered less than our modest amount of pain!
3. In the aftermath of new year 2000 I read lots of online comments from people like Gary North claiming that the US administration was covering up the nature of the problem and we'd see the collapse of society etc etc soon - perhaps he is still holed up in a cave in Montana living on beef jerky and listening to his clockwork radio!
2937050
This is an accurate reflection of what I remember as an often frustrating and sometimes wonderful series.

The sales pitch for each school. The audience shots are fun. The hyper announcer jabbering over some of the music. The use of only one mic for every three performers. The women singers gazing adoringly at the men (looks silly in closeup.) The performers looking insane in closeup because they are trying to project to a live audience in a giant arena (experienced performers like Tommy Makem or Flatt and Scruggs just depend on their music.) Bits of racism (for example, the Asian member of the New Christy Minstrels doing a verse in pidgin English.) Some college-student snobbery (for example, the Louis Nye routine.)

As another reviewer pointed out, a lot of the pop-folk performances don't stand up well - many of them don't have enough variation in tempo, rhythm, or volume through the length of the song. (However, with a DVD you can skip forward.)

I especially liked Flatt and Scruggs, the Clancy Brothers, Joe & Eddie, Ian and Sylvia.

Some fine performances that I remember aren't here - the producers of this set were no doubt unable to clear rights for some songs that are still under copyright by the composer or the composer's estate. That is a general problem when old TV material is reissued on DVD.

I was very glad to see this set -- but be forewarned: it is a very mixed bag.