Dream-Time

O'Brien's kaleidoscopic portrayal of the cultural and political ferment of the 1960s is framed in a style at once oracular, lyrical, impressionistic and ironic: ``You parachute into a country without maps''; ``The television was an open funnel, with its other end stuck in the middle of everything.'' Overheated and overintellectualized, these 13 vignettes nevertheless succeed in filtering out the decade's real promise from its false hopes and dead ends. O'Brien, author of Hard-Boiled America, evokes complacent suburbanites, pseudorebellious youth, the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy, hippies, ``Camelot'' politicians, Maoists and film critics. He paints U.S. politics as an arena where the two major parties had become little more than ``rival PR firms.'' Even as he derides the excesses, he rethinks the certitudes and retraces the experimental forays of an adventurous decade. (June)