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Alex Underground
Finally, a novel about the radical underground from one who was there.
Jonathan Lerner, a founding member of the Weather Underground, draws on memory and imagination to tell an authentic story of politics and passion, idealism and deceit, love, loss and survival.
It’s 1970, the era of transgressive sex, psychedelic drugs and violent revolution.
Alex gives an impassioned speech that incites a deadly campus riot; he and Doug take off on the run. Chicago, Paris, London, Havana. Highways and hideouts, cocktail bars and cruising spots, all-night drives, secret meetings and a bank heist that goes spectacularly wrong... Meanwhile Alex comes to sees that his friend can never give him what he really wants. So he uses this clandestine interlude to uncover his own hidden truth.
Pretended identities, twisted secrets – but coming out gay and whole on the other side.
“That awful year,” Alex will reflect much later, “when a benign impulse to remake the world led me to do so many strange and regrettable things.” This is a gripping story of the knotted psychology beneath political action, and one man’s struggle to find his honest self.
Jonathan Lerner, a founding member of the Weather Underground, draws on memory and imagination to tell an authentic story of politics and passion, idealism and deceit, love, loss and survival.
It’s 1970, the era of transgressive sex, psychedelic drugs and violent revolution.
Alex gives an impassioned speech that incites a deadly campus riot; he and Doug take off on the run. Chicago, Paris, London, Havana. Highways and hideouts, cocktail bars and cruising spots, all-night drives, secret meetings and a bank heist that goes spectacularly wrong... Meanwhile Alex comes to sees that his friend can never give him what he really wants. So he uses this clandestine interlude to uncover his own hidden truth.
Pretended identities, twisted secrets – but coming out gay and whole on the other side.
“That awful year,” Alex will reflect much later, “when a benign impulse to remake the world led me to do so many strange and regrettable things.” This is a gripping story of the knotted psychology beneath political action, and one man’s struggle to find his honest self.
207 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 15, 2009
2 people are currently reading
4 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Lerner
6 books18 followersWhen Jonathan Lerner's first novel Caught in a Still Place was published, Booklist said, “Lerner breaks the mold. Candid, understated, self-effacing, funny, as stripped down as the emptied world."
Caught in a Still Place describes a dystopian future when a group of people on an obscure Florida island survive a mysterious plague.
Lerner's other books are the novel Alex Underground and the memoir Swords in the Hands of Children. Both deal with his experiences in the radical movement of the Sixties, and the challenges of doing so as a young gay man. His novel Lily Narcissus is about an American expat family in Asia in the Vietnam War era.
He is also an award-winning journalist focusing on travel, architecture and environment. His work has run in The New York Times, Metropolis, Travel+Leisure, Men's Journal, Modern Maturity and elsewhere, and he is a contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine.
He lives with his husband in New York's Hudson Valley.
Caught in a Still Place describes a dystopian future when a group of people on an obscure Florida island survive a mysterious plague.
Lerner's other books are the novel Alex Underground and the memoir Swords in the Hands of Children. Both deal with his experiences in the radical movement of the Sixties, and the challenges of doing so as a young gay man. His novel Lily Narcissus is about an American expat family in Asia in the Vietnam War era.
He is also an award-winning journalist focusing on travel, architecture and environment. His work has run in The New York Times, Metropolis, Travel+Leisure, Men's Journal, Modern Maturity and elsewhere, and he is a contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine.
He lives with his husband in New York's Hudson Valley.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 24, 2011
Interesting take on the "coming out" story. The ending is a little abrupt, though.
April 19, 2014
I though it was an interesting take on that time period
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews