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Review
'A fascinating journey into the spirit and adventure of the 60s' -- Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky
'One of the most delightfully diverting explorations of the byways of memory - and one of the most profound.' --New Statesman
'Irwin brilliantly conjures the mood of the late Sixties, with its blind innocence, fanciful enthusiasms and blissful music' --Literary Review
'I could not put it down until I had read it twice. This is a brilliant, free-ranging, mind-enhancing, life-cautioning book.' --Independent
'Compelling, fascinating and enriching' --Spectator
'This is a heady, insightful and melancholy trip' --Word
'A tale as fluid and as finally mysterious as the life it recounts' --New Statesman
'Packed with extraordinary characters and incidents as well as a generous helping of drugs, sex and rock `n' roll' --London Review Bookshop
'Charged with life, humanity and humour - opens one's eyes to possibilities, which was what the 1960s vibe was about' --Financial Times
'This is a brilliant, free-ranging, mind-enhancing, life-cautioning book. Beware' --Independent
'Robert Irwin's memoir is a fabulously entertaining tale' --Metro
'For the reader, the journey - and the fall - is an illuminating and immensely engrossing one' --Literary Review
'An extraordinary book' --Conde Nast Traveller
'One of the most delightfully diverting explorations of the byways of memory - and one of the most profound.' --New Statesman
'Irwin brilliantly conjures the mood of the late Sixties, with its blind innocence, fanciful enthusiasms and blissful music' --Literary Review
'I could not put it down until I had read it twice. This is a brilliant, free-ranging, mind-enhancing, life-cautioning book.' --Independent
'Compelling, fascinating and enriching' --Spectator
'This is a heady, insightful and melancholy trip' --Word
'A tale as fluid and as finally mysterious as the life it recounts' --New Statesman
'Packed with extraordinary characters and incidents as well as a generous helping of drugs, sex and rock `n' roll' --London Review Bookshop
'Charged with life, humanity and humour - opens one's eyes to possibilities, which was what the 1960s vibe was about' --Financial Times
'This is a brilliant, free-ranging, mind-enhancing, life-cautioning book. Beware' --Independent
'Robert Irwin's memoir is a fabulously entertaining tale' --Metro
'For the reader, the journey - and the fall - is an illuminating and immensely engrossing one' --Literary Review
'An extraordinary book' --Conde Nast Traveller
Book Description
For many children of the sixties a 'journey to the East' was a necessary rite of passage. In an extraordinary memoir Robert Irwin contrasts the contexts of England - the new culture and the hippy trail - with those of Algeria - bombs and guns and mysticism.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A weird and whacky view of a different sixties. Sex and drungs and rock 'n' roll? No. Sufism and quite some erudition in the world of philosophical meanderings and Islam. Often funny and stimulating. Would it have been as interesting (or accessibl;e) for me if I hadn't been at Oxford and indeed in Algeria at around the same time - albeit moving in very different circles? Dunno. Quite hard work in places and you certainly need an open mind, one not looking for 'answers'. But as a record of one man's 'journey' it is often provoking (in a good way). He writes from a different perspective now with no real clue as to why he reached where he has. But that doesn't matter.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Francoise Hardy, Velvet Underground, Simon Smith and his Amazing Dancing Bear; Frithjof Schuon, Christmas Humphreys, Ouspensky; The Meaning of Life, talking all night, hitch-hiking; Better Books, S.O.A.S, Notting Hill Project; Aleister Crowley, Louis Massignon (but oddly, not Henri Corbin), Shaikh al-Alawi; LSD, speed, strange tobacco. In fact, I didn't buy this because of the 60's nostalgia (I have my own, and don't normally need anyone else's), but because I have liked all of Robert Irwin's books, and like the way he writes, and here his down to earth humour and not infrequent wisdom (of which there are some very nice touches near the end) is given ample scope. But once into the book, almost every reference (except Sufi monastic life and black magic, not my things) had a resonance for me. In short, an autobiography that reads like a cracking good novel. But it is a life, a variety of which we all, of that generation, have, and this is a rather a wonderful one. And, when it's beginning to close, and we have long since "fallen to earth", something of all of that, as in Irwin's case, remains.
Format:Paperback
I really enjoyed this book; read it twice in fact, which I rarely do. What shines through is the way the essential truth of the author's youthful Sufic exposure triumphed through to his later years, despite the blind alleys of intellectualism and drugs which he also explored from time to time. This is an honest and open account of a spiritual journey, one that moves one to recognize a sincere brother. If I have one lament, it would be in relation to the casual way Mr. Irwin dismisses Subud, which in my opinion and experience, can be said to equate with 'doing the beautiful,' to quote from the Gabriel Hadith.
Emmanuel Elliott
Emmanuel Elliott
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