PROMISED LANDS Growing Up Absurd in the 1950s and '60s is a personal memoir that encompasses a rural Ontario boyhood marked by family tragedy, youthful travels through Europe and the Middle East, and film school and radical politics in London in the late 1960s. Drugs, war, imprisonment and lots of sex highlight a tense, hilarious and moving account of a search for identity and meaning in a time of deep cultural turmoil. This remarkable book offers an extraordinarily candid recollection of the odyssey of a young man from small-town, Protestant, 1950s Ontario in a quest for adventure and self-discovery in Europe and the Middle East. His search takes him through the burgeoning counter-culture underground of the late 1960s - drugs, hippy street life, imprisonment, the June war of 1967, and psychedelics in Pamplona - and on to study in a British film school and embrace of radical politics. By turns hilarious, provocative and deeply sad, it's an irresistibly disarming portrait of blighted youth blundering through a notorious period of social upheaval. The poignancy, wit and truthfulness of the writing are spellbinding.
