Pynchon mention in CHAOS review

[rich]

Despite misgivings about the Manson hype and the nutcases it attracts, I
was pleasantly surprised by how good Chaos was. The hoops Manson was able
to jump through, the breaks he got to avoid or leave prison does lead one
to believe someone might have been running him within the LAPD and/or
federal authorities. As you say Thomas, what is incontrovertible is the
CIA/LSD experiments--it's nasty and shameful history
and it confirms even more what a total shit Bugliosi was

rich

On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 4:49 PM Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>
wrote:

> I intended to write a longer piece on this book, especially Reeve
> Whitson, but for now this will have to do.
>
> This is from a review of Tom O'Neill's "CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA
> and the Secret History of the Sixties":
>
> "In fairness O’Neill is an endearing figure and comes across like the
> sleepy PI Elliot Gould plays in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973).
> He’s a dazed presence straight from the pages of Thomas Pynchon, trapped
> in a real-life version of Inherent Vice (2009) and struggling, in
> Pynchon’s words, to avoid giving us an “unabridged paranoid hippy
> monologue”. But when I got to the end of this book I went back to the
> start, then I stopped and I thought: would I read it again? Probably not."
>
>
> https://thequietus.com/articles/27107-tom-o-neill-chaos-charles-manson-cia-mkultra-review
>
> I find this quite unfair. The book is based on solid research, and the
> implications of the CIA employing counterinsurgency/MK ULTRA methods
> against domestic opposition are endless.
>
> Me, I would surely read "CHAOS" again, just like I would "The Family"
> and "The Shadow Over Santa Susana."
>
> I especially heart Tom O'Neills reluctance to draw the conclusions that
> might seem obvious to the more paranoid among us because, as much as he
> must have tried, he cannot prove them. What O'Neill *can* prove about
> Reeve Whitson and Jolly West and Roger Smith and their links to Charlie
> Manson, however, is enough to set the mind a-reeling, hippy or not.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>