Review: Then and Now: The Harmony of the Instantaneous All by Randy Attwood

I enjoyed this book, It tells the story of Stan Nelson and his time at KU in Lawrence, during winter and spring 1969 - 1970, Stan was like the central character in the middle of everyone that was involved in the scenes.

I loved the fact that we were hearing it in Stan’s narrative and the fact that we were going back in time to hear about his experiences and also other characters stories of that time period. I even enjoyed when Stan had to improvise certain characters parts. I particularly enjoyed Charlie’s parts of the story and his romance with Betty. We also had the use of diary extracts from Melvins diary which almost made it feel like you were reading a true story.

There were several romance’s in the book, the main one being with Stan and Yen-Li which then grew into an obsession, and then how he dealt with that. But this book isn’t just all romance, we see riots with police caught in the middle and also causing more trouble!

We also hear about the play that Stan decided to participate in, this was almost like another story in the story and I was glad that we got to ‘see’ the play being acted out. I thought the way the book ended was lovely and was glad to see that Stan would be ok at last.