More than comments on the 90's scene, they chronicle a civilization in agony. As media conglomerates and 'correct' academic experts dominate American discourse, Ventura's clear, no b.s. These concise, elegant, and somehow 'final' testimonies are the work of an uncompromising spirit. I was happy to share the wonder of his discoveries, and felt the burden and strangeness of our generation's peculiar 'job' as the millennium roars to a close. Codrescu An excerpt from Letters at 3 A.M. 248 pp.
Many men find it hard to move away from their fathers.
Richard Oliver's easy way out would have been to reject him, which at times he tried to do. Oliver's harder task, which he eventually acknowledged to be the right one, was to accept his famous father as a human being, who lived his life as well as he could. In some ways Melting the Stone is a journey around Richard Oliver's father, in others a search for mature masculinity, encompassing emotion as well as thought and deed. And at times these overlap, for the father is the son's first image of manhood. This in turn was the inspiration for him to set up a small men's group, and enter analysis.