Word: richmond
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...latest ruckus began when the N.C.A.A. barred coaches and athletes under its jurisdiction from participating in two A.A.U.-sponsored competitions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. As a result, a weakened American team lost a track meet to the Russians in Richmond last month. More of the same seemed likely in a series of Soviet-American basketball games that will begin April 29 in Los Angeles. Last week N.C.A.A. Executive Director Walter Byers told the House Special Education Subcommittee that his organization would cooperate in the basketball event if the A.A.U. would formally apply for the services of undergraduate...
...Richmond's High on Gold--and the title speaks for itself--is a swansong from the heart that seems to have taken rather a long time getting to the mouth. Five years in the composing is slightly ridiculous, given the product. Given the timing, it's a little pathetic--like a guest who arrives when the party is over, strewing confetti over an empty room and playing Cassandra after the fact...
NEVERTHELESS, the portrait is only too true. Despite his sometimes sentimental attitude towards the Aquarian paradise and his simplistic account of its corruption by the media, Richmond has drawn a life-sized and realistic picture: His protagonists are not "hippies." They are individuals, children of the bourgeoisie, living entirely for the very stoned present. Young, confused, vulnerable, and tragically in love with the idea of a spontaneous revolution, they live out a morality of egoism to which even the petty cruelty of schoolchildren is preferable. There at least is a coherent ethics, compared to which Richmond's counterculture...
...doubt but that the intentions are good. But intentions alone don't make a good story. Happily Richmond has done one or two interesting things that distract from the conspicuous banality of his prose. Midway through his narrative he includes an account of Joshua Aarons, a Victorian renegade who joined the Gold Rush, decamped to the Indians, and burrowed into a cave, leaving his diary of reminiscences and prophecies as testimony to the historicity of counterculture. Historicity or no, Joshua Aarons lends the author an opportunity to affect a Victorian prose style, demonstrating that Richmond can in fact do more...
High on Gold is Richmond's first novel, and there's much to be learned from it, although admittedly more in the line of the How Not To, than the How To. But still, there are enough happy accidents here to make it worth another go. For the main problem is, that like most first novels, Richmond's is myopically autobiographical. That's a disease that is sometimes curable with...