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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
But Stone is a born storyteller, with a wonderful feel for place and character that vividly evokes the cultural gulf America crossed in that decade. [9 Oct 2006, p.45]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
An excellent piece of work, and an invaluable gloss on a body of fiction that looks more prescient, and important, as the decades pass. [15 Sept 2006, p.943]
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Outstanding
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New York Observer John H. Summers
Mr. Stone remembers it all with a mix of anecdote, commentary and deft description. Prime Green is excellent on almost every page - free of solipsism, in light of how many experiences he acquired "on the road,"
and yet equally free of cliche. [15 Jan 2007, p.6]
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Walter Kirn
He's in the here and now on every page, the here and now that is notably and brutally not the there and then, with its visions of peace and its psychedelic bus trips. He doesn't cheat himself or us, that is, of ironies, regrets and second thoughts, although he delivers them tonally, not explicitly.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Wendy Smith
Stone's memoir of the 1960s views with unsentimental clarity a decade that has been the subject of more overheated rhetoric than any other in U.S. history.
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Floyd Skloot
The language is right for the era, and readers who appreciate such elevated generalizing will find Prime Green a resonant work.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
Being a novelist, Stone is adept at scenes and situations, and what could otherwise have been a somewhat banal listing of itinerant jobs that waft through his narrative--working at sensationalist tabloid newspapers, staffing an art gallery that "represented the Old Left pretty much in repose"--is instead enlivened with his irreverence in detail.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Ken Tucker
Considering that the great novelist Robert Stone ("Dog Soldiers") spent part of the 1960s snorting heroin, dropping acid, and inhaling helium from inflated condoms, he has written a remarkably lucid, passionate history and defense of that decade's countercultural tendencies.
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Favorable
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Booklist Keir Graff
His crystalline prose makes the project seem simple, but, of course, it's not; achingly honest and unself-serving, Stone fixes on different details and observes them differently. [15 Nov 2006, p.17]
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Mixed
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
In recounting such adventures, Mr. Stone has a disconcerting way of hopscotching from incident to incident, memory to memory, often leaving the reader wanting more details and more follow-up. The same thing can be said of his portraits, which are fascinating as far as they go, but often trail off into sketchiness...What Mr. Stone excels at is conjuring the mood of specific times and places, capturing the attitude he and his friends shared as well as the larger zeitgeist.
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Unfavorable
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Los Angeles Times David L. Ulin
Yet with Prime Green, Stone backs away from such complexities, offering commonplaces as opposed to questions, anecdotes that never add up to anything larger than themselves. That may well be how memory works, but there's a difference between memory and memoir, which requires not just recollection but reflection, a perspective and a point of view.
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Unfavorable
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Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
As an admirer of Stone's fiction, I was unsettled by this casual voice -- where is the searching, almost scary tenor of Stone the novelist? But the narrator of "Prime Green" is more interested in describing the flashbacks of an exotic life than in putting a literary spin to those memories. It's Stone's missive from his piece of psychedelic history -- his postcards from the edge.
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Terrible
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PopMatters Chauncey Mabe
Surely the most disappointing book to come out in this young and troubled year...Prime Green gives every indication of not having been written at all, but spoken, presumably into a tape recorder, and the result has all the charm and pleasure of listening to a uncle fumbling through half-remembered stories, somewhere south of the third cocktail, at a family gathering.
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