RECENT REVIEWS:

The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 by Thomas Ott »

Omaha Steaks' The Great American Grilling Book by John Harrison and Judith Choate »

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming + James Bond by Ben Macintyre »

Skyscrapers of the Midwest by Joshua W. Cotter »

True Norwegian Black Metal by Peter Beste  »

Robert Stone's best novels -- Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Outerbridge Reach and Damascas Gate -- all include voyages over psychological and political terrain. Their protagonists share a distinctly 1960s predisposition toward searching with quixotic and ill-informed purpose. At the same time, those looking for simple leisure reading will find these novels to be exceedingly well-told stories.

Prime Green, too, is well-told. Its episodic remembrances provide some insight into the picaresque, mystifyingly well-informed search that turned Stone into one of his generation's major novelists. It also offers a historical perspective on the 1960s, drawn from personal experience, with the occasional sly critique of the early 21st century thrown in for good measure. Finally, it delivers a look at the 1960s from somebody who not only came of age in the period, but spent time dropping acid with Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady.

The geographic sweep of the book is impressive. Stone traces his peregrinations -- from the Navy to New York, where he worked at The New York Daily News and met his wife; to New Orleans, where the pair scraped by; to Palo Alto, where he met Ken Kesey; back to New York, where he wrote for tabloids; then on to Mexico, where he hung out with Kesey (the title Prime Green comes from daybreak on Manzanillo Bay during this period). There are digressions to Paris, London, Hollywood (where he adapted his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, into the film WUSA), even Vietnam.

To Stone's credit, all the moving to-and-fro doesn't get in the way of colorful remembrances of people he met in each place. Nor is this a conventional autobiography: Stone leaves as many questions about his life unanswered and unexplored as those he answers and explores. You're left wondering how he and his wife navigated an affair he had at Stanford, for instance. But as a series of snapshots that offer insight into the experiences that shaped Stone as a writer, Prime Green gives plenty of insight and some deliciously engaging stories.