This is one of the many books I have bought over the years on an impulse after flicking through the blurb on the back. I have read quite a few books written by and about drug smugglers and dealers over the years but never one by someone who was involved in the LSD trade. I expected this to be an interesting book in a similar vein to those written by Howard Marks, Harry Ferguson or Rusty Young.

The book starts off with the arrest of Fielding and then cuts backward and forward between the time following his arrest and his past upto that point. This is all interesting enough stuff but I don't go a lot for the childhood of people in biographies. It tends to bore me quite a bit and although Fielding's was ok I expected it to carry on as a normal run of the bill biography.

Once the story gets into the swing though things really pick up. Fielding tells of his time after education where he became a hippie, dropped out and basically traveled using just his smarts and the kindness of stranger to survive. Along the way are times spent with other dope smoking hippie travelers, brushes with the law and the tale of an era long gone. This is what I suspect On The Road would have been like if it had been written by a European and in a slightly more modern tone. Fielding really gets into what it was like to be part of what they expected to be the movement of social change in the world.

This really is a fantastic book about the 60's, psychedelics and the innocence of the time. Drugs are a part of the book but there is so much more to this tale. ( )