Feelgood: A Trip in Time and Out.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970. First Edition. Octavo, tan cloth (hardcover), uncut, 400 pp. Very Good, with small area of discoloration to upper cover -- interior clean, tight, and attractive; in a mylar protected dust jacket with palm-sized damp stain to spine & upper cover (otherwise, bright and attractive). From dust jacket: “In these pages, I offer only my story. You may suggest that the historian is also the diligent spinner of a tale.” So writes Peter de Lissovoy, the young man at the center of this beautifully written narrative. He writes about a period of his life which took him from Harvard and the campus drug scene to a small Georgia town where he hoped to find a place in the civil rights movement. The futility of the movement was not unlike that he had felt at college, but it served as a spring-board for a passionate journey on the black side of a small southern town he calls Meansville, Georgia...His search ended in the cool earth on the banks of the Meansville River, and in the swamp next to it. Here he sat with Dr. Feelgood, a gentle sage who practiced root medicine, and Yellow, a cripple who spent his life fishing for sunnies in the peaceful river. Together they smoked the potent grass that Feelgood had gathered from the swamp where it grew wild. And listening to Feelgood think out loud, the wanderer began to understand the nature of his quest. His sympathy for the black American began to shift in its derivation from a vague wish for involvement in something to a truer understanding, and hence became a sympathy no longer confined to a praticular race. (Inventory #: ess4601)