DOC Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace; Love; and Acid to the World by Nicholas Schou in History

Review

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. Orange SunshineBy RichardI came of age just as this stuff was making its way in to my mid-western; small town. Yes; I partook. WOW! I don't recommend drug use; but this stuff was something else. I had friends who took it and became fish; another made love to the lawn in back of our old high school; --- and as for me; the sky became Van Gogh's Starry Night as the the street wrapped up around us; and I found myself riding in a car shooting down a tube. This is an interesting history of a type of LSD that (and I say this with all candor and humility) changed the world. There are people walking around today; in high (forgive my use of that word) places; running things that ingested this stuff. Orange Sunshine rippled out through time and has shaped our world. (Sorry Bill; a lot of people did inhale.). --- This book is a well written history that filled in a lot of background of my youth; a good story that most are not aware of; and in today's sad and tragic drug culture; most will never understand. If you want to better understand the late 60's and early 70's; this is your book.7 of 7 people found the following review helpful. Mind-benderBy David I. CahillImagine getting blasted on pot and putting Jimi Hendrix's "Band of Gypsies" on the stereo system. A few minutes later; Hendrix himself walks in with a six-pack of Miller High Life; saying "I don't like that album. It's imperfect." This is not fantasy but reality. It's the summer of 1970 on Maui; Hawaii; where Hendrix performed a free concert on the slopes of the Haleakala Volcano while being filmed; along with Les Potts (the lucky partaker of Hendrix's beer) and other Brotherhood of Eternal Love members for the music documentary; Jimi Hendrix - Rainbow Bridge. This scene doesn't begin to describe the incidents and events packed into this history of the early LSD-drenched days of the sixties in the LA area (with excursions to Hawaii and Afghanistan). Many books have been written about the sixties. This one concentrates specifically on the cast of bizarre characters who morphed from petty rebel-with-a-cause-type criminals running around looking for people to beat up; into peaceniks out to save the world by means of (literally) millions of doses of Orange Sunshine - reputed to be the finest acid ever produced on a mass scale.Some of these events are so unbelievable as to scarcely be imagined and unlikely to ever occur again in any locale; like the 1970 "Christmas Happening" in Laguna Canyon; which attempted to outdo Woodstock by getting all 25;000 participants (150;000 were expected) high on acid after thousands of hits Orange Sunshine were dumped over the crowd by plane. The festival; with hordes of naked people; many freely having sex and many more extremely hungry due to nonexistent planning for food; was brutally broken up and cleared out a day later by the police. Then there was the very far-out smuggling operation employing a sailboat boat packed with high-grade marijuana that successfully made the journey from Mexico to Hawaii through high seas and storms - by a crew with little-to-no maritime experience and no navigation equipment except the starsFor all the wildness and insane schemes; this was an unprecedented era in modern times unlikely ever to be to repeated; when economic prosperity; an increasingly educated population; and the irrepressible American brand of creativity and individualism came together and flared for a few years before too many red lines were crossed and the Establishment came down hard. We have taken quite a detour since (Nixon; Reagan; the Bushes) but things may be picking up again with the groundswell of national support for marijuana legalization. The sixties is not over yet.Nicholas Schou did a lot of digging and has succeeded in weaving a richly detailed yet economically told account. The major lacuna; to my mind; is with so much focus on the histrionics and spectacles; and the author's suppressing of his own point of view in the interest of journalistic objectivity; we seldom get into the actual heads of the main actors (John Griggs; Eddie Padilla; Johnny Gale; Timothy Leary; etc.). LSD was the prime mover of this history; yet one almost suspects Schou himself has never ingested any (I can't believe he hasn't); what with the utter absence of any sustained descriptions of the LSD experience that would help clarify for the uninitiated reader what animated these crazy people to live fascinating lives on the edge (here we miss our genius drug muse Terence McKenna; e.g. True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise).3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. If you surfed or grew up in Sothern California during this time; you will find this a very intertaining and fascinating readBy John LeeVery interesting and informative read. Lots of fascinating details about the players in this saga and where these events took place. I know of no other source or reference where this information has been compiled in one place. I like the author's point of view; in that he attempts to convey facts from this era as well as real quotes from the individuals being described. He does not slant the narrative either pro-drug use or anti-drug use; which is not easy to do when relating this sort of story.