Dennis McNally – författare

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Strange Trip and the publicist of the Grateful Dead, Dennis McNally, a riveting social history of everything that led up to the 1960s counterculture movement.Few cities represent the countercultural movement of the 1960s more than San Francisco. By that decade, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was home to several hundred colorful refugees from the conventional, self-branded "freaks" (dubbed "hippies" by the media) who created the world's first psychedelic neighborhood, an alchemical chamber for social transformation. Collectively, these freaks rejected a large part of the mythology underlying the traditional American identity, passing over American exceptionalism, consumerism, misogyny, and militarism in favor of creativity, mind-body connection, peace, and love of all things-humans, animals, and nature alike.Dennis McNally, author of the New York Times bestseller A Long, Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, is a consummate historian of the counterculture. He knows the big picture of the American bohemian tradition going back a century with a depth that is unrivaled. In THE LAST GREAT DREAM, his accessible, often riveting scholarship establishes a multi-disciplinary aesthetic, populated by some of the most colorful and trailblazing characters of these times, from Allen Ginsberg to John Cage to Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theater, to Lenny Bruce, to Ken Kesey, and scores of lesser-known yet key names. It is a who's who of the courageous pioneers who changed America forever without spilling a drop of blood. While all of these various strands have been written about before, none of their stories have been pulled together into a larger, expansive, more connected picture in the manner that McNally accomplishes with this definitive book. THE LAST GREAT DREAM is a history of everything that led to the 1960s counterculture, when long-simmering resistance to American mainstream values birthed the hippie. It begins with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, peaks with the Human Be-in in Golden Gate Park, and ends with the Monterey Pop Festival that introduced Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to the world. It ties everything together into a gripping narrative with a cast of scores of fascinating people, and tells several micro-histories in the process, including beat poetry, visual arts, underground publishing, electronic / contemporary compositional music, experimental theater, psychedelics, and more. Fascinating, far-reaching, and definitive, THE LAST GREAT DREAM is the ultimate guide to a generation-defining countercultural movement, an Underground 101 course for newcomers and aficionados alike.

Jack Kerouac-"King of the Beats," unwitting catalyst for the'60s counterculture, ground-breaking author-was a complex and compelling man: a star athlete with a literary bent a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism. Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that became a lifelong obsession. Kerouac's frenetic cross-country journeys, experiments with drugs and sexuality, travels to Mexico and Tangier, and years of failure, frustration, and depression are recounted with detail and sensitivity. Desolate Angel is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of a man and artist set against an extraordinary social backdrop.

The Grateful Dead were one of the most fascinating rock bands and cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. Despite having few mainstream hits, from 1965 to 1995 the Dead blazed an extraordinary incendiary trail across the rock firmament. Exploding from the roots and folk scene of the early 1960s, the Dead went on to provide the soundtrack to the Dionysiac revels of the burgeoning counterculture. Their history is the history of the modern American Revolution in the years of rage and rebellion, which were to change the country forever. Here is the band's full story. Not just a brilliant rock biography, it forms a compelling portrait of America's West Coast from the halcyon days of Magic Buses and Merry Pranksters to the corporate dawn of the twenty-first century.

The Church needs the arts, as they are a way to access the soul. As Augustine says, one who sings, prays twice. Recent popes have given the impression that the Church is again interested in the way the arts draw us into ourselves, where we are able to contact the mystery that is God. Art for Church is a personal and professional expression of how that renewed interest plays itself out. This text takes its name from the "cloth of gold," an image related to centuries of experimentation by the medieval and Renaissance worlds as they sought an alchemical solution to worship. There previously existed a centuries-long search for how to make golden cloth that would praise God; this pursuit distinctly resembles the quest of the artist to produce the perfect product. Pope Paul VI (1897-1978) and his papal fraternity had set the tone, too often a confining one, for such an alchemical quest in the Church. Unfortunately, the music in the artist's heart is not always the same as that in the heart of the pastor. Pope Paul VI eventually did apologize for the "cloak of lead" he imposed upon artists creating works in the name of the Church. He also came to admit that artistic freedom is a necessary part of the process when the Church seeks the works of artists. In this book, McNally offers insights on how much freedom is necessary for art to flourish in the service of the Church and just what is at stake if that freedom is curtailed. Art for Church contains over 120 original paintings and 30 original poems by the author.