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Bottom of the pile
4
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
1/100Critics
7/100Scholars
Author:
John Taylor Williams
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
May 17, 2022
The history of a generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who created a Bohemian utopia on the windblown shores of Cape Cod.
What The Reviewers Say
Intended as a group biography, Mr. Williams’s book is at times more 'group' than 'biography,' its pages popping with the names of the well-known and forgotten, from the free spirits of the first generation to the variously hued leftists and ex-leftists of the 1930s and ’40s to the academically employed sunseekers of the 1960s.
... atmospheric, gossipy.
Nearly all seem to have been graduates of Ivy League schools. But their passion and urgency for social justice is vividly evoked in Williams’s book.
As a comprehensive guide to every family and famous person who lived on the Outer Cape in the first half of the last century, their friendships, love affairs and lineages, the book is invaluable. But it’s also extremely dense, an over-floured chowder so packed with 50 years of names, names and more names that some paragraphs read like a telephone book. It’s partly a function of the book’s thoroughness, but it makes it hard reading — even for someone like me who has now spent 26 consecutive summers in exactly this part of the world, for many of the same reasons these men and women once did. But Williams does cite the prose of many of his subjects to convey the magic of the place..
