Drop City

by T.C. Boyle
Drop City
book data
2,219 ratings, 3.75 average rating, 357 reviews (more data...)
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published
January 27th 2004 (first published 2002) by Penguin (Non-Classics)

binding
Paperback, 512 pages

isbn
0142003808    (isbn13: 9780142003800)

description
With Drop City, T. Coraghessan Boyle offers proof that he has become one of America's most prolific, gifted storytellers. Set in the 1970s, Boyle ente...more




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Jason Pettus
07/18/07
Jason Pettus rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in July, 2007
(Full essay can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

(Just like anyone else who is a lover of great books, I find myself sometimes with a desire to become a "completist" of certain authors; that is, to have read every book that author has ever written. This new series of essays chronicles that attempt.)

So first, a confession, that I still have a long way to go before becoming a completist of author TC Boyle; this is on...more
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John
09/05/08
John rated it: 5 of 5 stars

Read in April, 2009
recommended to John by: a couple of friends
recommends it for: readers who like a laugh & a challenge
Already a clear-cut five-star, even before I finish, TC Boyle's ripe and agitated revisit to the hippie extremes of the late '60s offers both a celebration and a slam. DROP CITY is the first novel of his I've tasted in a while; for years I'd sampled only the sharply-cornered ironies, their furniture often surreal, of his magazine fiction. Those always cracked the imaginative whip impressively, and trapezed their way through some breathtaking analogies, but this novel puts both those gifts on d...more
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Bonnie Jeanne
01/25/09
Bonnie Jeanne rated it: 2 of 5 stars

I read T.C. Boyle's, Tortilla Curtain, which I did enjoy, though not love. Having now read two of his books, I think I might retire this author to my "Only If There Is Nothing Else To Read" list. Not that I didn't like this story, I did, but I don't think I could take another tale of good and evil and how easy it is to confuse the two. [return][return]One of the annoying things in this book is the author's tendency to use the given and hippie names of the Drop City residents interchang...more
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Jeffrey
04/22/07
Jeffrey rated it: 2 of 5 stars

Drop City? More like Drop - alright I won't go there. Needless to say I was not pleased with this read. T.C. Boyle has apparently won prestigious literary awards. This is the only book I have read by him and it leaves me wondering how this is possible. Drop City is the story of a 20-something girl, nicknamed Star (ugh...), who joins a hippie commune in the early '70s in California that eventually chooses to pick up and move to their leader's uncle's cabin and land in Alaska. The book is sim...more
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Conrad
03/25/07
Conrad rated it: 4 of 5 stars

bookshelves: fiction
What to make of this book? It's two parallel stories about the 60s in Alaska. One: a hardy homesteader couple. Two: a bunch of hippies, "persecuted" by the law in Mendocino county, who decide to go back to the land, or at least drive a few thousand miles in a giant school bus and set up camp. No points for guessing which social experiment lasts longer.

It's a sort of unaffectionate look at the pomp and circumstance of the 1960s. I can certainly sympathize with Boyle's derisi...more
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Yelena Malcolm
10/17/07
Yelena Malcolm rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Read in November, 2007
Drop City was a solid read. Tracing the journeys of members of a commune and the lives of those native Alaskans they encounter, the novel is both social commentary and strong narrative. Evocative both of communal living and the pioneering lifestyle, the prose was fluid.

More interesting, though, was the decidedly apolitical view of both lifestyles whch are outside the status quo. While pointing out the limitations of homesteading and relative anarchy, one never felt the author was lau...more
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Tara
11/30/08
Tara rated it: 4 of 5 stars

This book made me homesick for Santa Rosa. The story is about a hippie commune built just outside the city limits on the principal of "Land Access To Which Is Denied No One" [oft referred to in the story by the cumbersome acronym LATWIDNO] by the callow but good-hearted nephew who inherits a large tract of land. The commune members are eventually evicted from the county on the grounds of all sorts of fire codes, condemned buildings, and that everyone was too high to make a real latri...more
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Becky
05/21/09
Becky rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Read in October, 2008

Slightly off my own self imposed bizarre system of order to this task, I bought Drop City in London after totally underestimating how much I'd manage to read on my stupendously long train journeys this weekend (back to Edinburgh via Newcastle then Carlisle?! Riiiight). Drop City details the occurences when two worlds collide - that of the "drop out" hippies in California with that of the men of the forest in Alaska - men who live off the land, who inhabit a single roomed cabin th...more
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Jeff
05/07/09
Jeff rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Read in May, 2009
I am almost obsessive about picking out extraneous language while reading novels, all the thoughtless barnacles of thought that cling to, and obscure, precision and clarity. Many times during my reading of this novel I stopped, looked away from the text and asked, "why would he say that?" finding that perfectly lucid passages were compromised by meaningless descriptors--dead words. Particularly annoying was "replete with" because that description has to correlation to any rea...more
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Lizzy
04/06/09
Lizzy rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in April, 2009
I read this book because there was hella butts on the cover and it always caught my eye on the shelf. After enough eye-catching, I finally read the back cover blurbs and decided that a story about a failing hippie commune was something I could work with. Since I was about 12 I've had a "problem" with T.C. Boyle, in that I always maintained that I "didn't like him" for "various reasons" which were actually "undefined" and maybe "actually non-existent."...more
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Trina
07/25/08
Trina rated it: 5 of 5 stars

I adored this long novel about 70s back-to-the-land hippies in California who move to Alaska and confront not only the weather and wilderness but also the tough, intolerant, self-reliant Alaskan bush dwellers who have an entirely different take on "back-to-the-land." T.C. Boyle is a great writer.
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Joan
03/23/09
Joan rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in March, 2009
For anyone who grew up in “the sixties,” the idea of dropping out of society and the establishment – tune in, turn on, drop out – seemed pretty romantic at the time, -- for a time. Barefoot hippies with granny dresses and flowers in their hair, a constant flow of drugs, free love, living off the land – what’s not to like, except for constantly dirty feet and bad trips, venereal disease, and cleaning up other people’s messes while never having time to yourself or food that seems ma...more
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Andrea
02/19/09
Andrea rated it: 5 of 5 stars

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in March, 2009
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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Oscar
03/18/09
Oscar rated it: 5 of 5 stars

Read in March, 2009
The year is 1970 and the the US is split...one one side you have the establishment and on the other you have Drop City. What is Drop City?!? Its anywhere where people can escape the rules and regulations of society and create their own little nirvana, a place to be free!!! What society fails to realize, often way too late, is that freedom isnt free.

When things dont go quite right at the first Drop City, Star, Marco, Pan, Norm, Premstar, Lydia, Verbie, Bill and the rest of the Dr...more
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Gymdogfran
03/26/09
Gymdogfran rated it: 5 of 5 stars

Read in April, 2009
I always really enjoy T.C. Boyle who writes about "eccentric" topics, usually inspired by actual events/history. (I have read The Road to Wellville, Riven Rock, and The Inner Circle, and there always seem to be naked people lying about here and there doing things that are often described in gratifying detail - not that there's anything wrong with that.) This book is about a Hippie/counter-culture compound in the late 1960s in California. The real one was in Colorado, and appears to ...more
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Jessica
01/26/09
Jessica rated it: 3 of 5 stars

bookshelves: 1001-books
Read in January, 2009
3.5 out of 5
In T.C. Boyle's novel, the Drop City referred to in the title is a free love hippie commune in the 1970's. The commune starts out in California where the hippies lounge about enjoying their lifestyle. After a run-in with the local law enforcement, they decide to move north to Alaska to start Drop City North on land that belongs to one of their uncles.

The book also follows the story of Sess and Pam Harder, two newlywed homesteaders living in the wilds of remote Alask...more
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katie
12/07/08
katie rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in December, 2008
I was given this book by a good friend who said it would be good beach reading for a recent trip... I thought "trashy page turned" especially since I had a British publication with a hippy couple going at it on the cover (got some good stares from fellow passengers on the plane!) But it turned into a really riveting story about different methods of escaping "plastic" society in the late 60's - early 70's... Follows 2 very different cultures, a hippie commune and Alaskan survi...more
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Tim Mccollough
05/17/09
Tim Mccollough rated it: 3 of 5 stars

Read in May, 2009
Excellent characters; and a good story interwoven with social commentary. Here, 1970's hippies -- peace, love, dope-loving California hippies -- facing a merciless Alaskan reality and a couldn't-be-starker contrast to Sess Harder, original outdoorsman.

Boyle is great at developing characters not only original and unique, but ones that you end up having strong feelings about, one way or another. Fuckin' Joe Bosky... what an asshole!

Good read, but a 500-page novel that...more
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Sonia
12/23/08
Sonia rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in February, 2009
This is my first T.C.Boyle book and I'm definitely going to read more of his because his writing is really good. The story, set in the late 60's, is about life in a Hippie commune in California, and a rustic newlywed couple in Alaska and what happens when the Hippie community packs up their camp in California and moves to the married couple's "neighborhood." I use the term lightly because this neighborhood in the middle of the wilderness, where you have to hunt for food and take a bo...more
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Starlight Bannon
08/21/08
Starlight Bannon rated it: 4 of 5 stars

Read in January, 2004
recommended to Starlight by: T.C. Boyle is a favorite of mine, so I found it on my own.
One of the things I loved about this book is that it wasn't a romanticized version of the 60s. As a teenager in the 80s, I heard so many fantastic stories of the 60s and listened to all the music from that time, and wished I could have been a teen 20 years earlier, without ever really considering the reality of living during wartime and watching friends and family members, maybe a boyfriend, go away to fight and not come back. I never really thought about what it took to be brave enough to go ...more
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