Arnold Books

Arnold J. Wohl's Good Medicine (Part One), of the ambitious triptych The Kind of Life That Was Being Lived, is far from a garden-variety book about the late 1960s in the United States of America. Instead, this novel paints a vivid, heartfelt picture of how freshly hatched hippies in an upper-middle-class suburb of New Jersey discover their Garden of Eden--and just how fragile that garden turns out to be.

Worlds collide in Good Medicine when Herschel Bluestein, the gifted, well-intentioned, but very lost scientist and protagonist of Good Training Parts One and Two, finds that his true sympathies lie with Cathy Polesanti, who babysits the Bluesteins' precocious three-year-old daughter. In 1967, when Part One of Good Medicine begins, Herschel is still a freak in disguise; he is an overweight and overwrought productive member of society, the precise age at which the nascent hippies refuse to trust a person, although his outbursts and foot-dragging still manage to alarm Barbara, his wife, who wants (and by the end of Part One, delivers) another baby and to maintain their upwardly mobile lifestyle. However, Wohl does not make the mistake of depicting Barbara as a one-note nag; she is sensitive and intelligent, although too refined to ever feel comfortable with her bull-in-a-china-shop husband, and she winds up defending Cathy the babysitter when other suburban moms rake her over the coals. Cathy, for her part, is more bemused by Herschel's clumsy efforts at connection than anything else; a particularly well-written scene shows Cathy's perusal of the Bluesteins' LP collection and incense burner that was obviously not utilized by its owners to cover the smell of pot. Herschel and Barbara later invite Cathy and her older brother Johnny, who is estranged from his family while dodging the draft, over for some holiday cheer, with expectedly awkward results. However, any reader can see that Herschel is a ticking time-bomb ready to explode--before his heart, both broken by past and present disappointments and literally vulnerable to the disease he is trying to discover a cure for, gives out. Herschel attends at Barbara's insistence a pitiful, boring meeting of SANE, a group of ineffectual, liberal Silent Generation suburbanites against thermonuclear war, and this underlines a theme already touched upon in Parts One and Two of Good Training: the scientist with the soul of a poet and the libido of a sailor on shore leave is far too radical for his meek, mannered cohort.

The character of Timothy Nickerson, who opens Good Medicine, is worthy of his own book. After a motorcycle ride with his negligent father leaves him with a mangled foot, he spends most of his time stoned or hallucinating while creating astounding paintings in the privacy of his attic room. Lovers of art will fall in love with Timothy due to Wohl's ability to describe these paintings--as any student or professor of art history can attest, this is not an easy task. Indeed, Timothy heals himself through his art, although his main emotion toward his clueless mother and hard-ass father is contempt. Timothy's high-school art teacher, who hails from the Land of the Fab Four, recognizes his talent and puts him in a show, but of course, her sympathies get her axed. But Timothy is no physically and emotionally crippled loner; he more than gets by with a little help from his friends. His company includes his earnest buddy Chan, who displays early politico tendencies and manages to scores acid from his cool older brother living the wild life in New York City; Cathy, the aforementioned babysitter, who blows Timothy's mind with an irresistible combination of fifteen-year-old sweetness and cool; and most significantly of all, his (slightly) younger sister Alexa. Throughout Good Medicine, Wohl delves inside the heads and hearts of his characters and makes situations that could be played for cheap thrills, such as the physical intimacy shared by Timothy and Alexa, very real and poignant. Timothy and Cathy have a wonderful LSD trip together (perhaps the funniest passage of the book describes such mythical courses as "Acid Fundamentals 001"), but far from being an unqualified endorsement for taking hallucinogens, the darkest chapter of Good Medicine details Alexa's acid experience--her first--gone terribly wrong, in which she drops a tab against the advice of her brother, who gently reminds her of the set-and-setting dictum of the most famous Timothy of that decade, the one who was fired from Harvard. At the beginning of Alexa's trip, she is dumped by her rich-boy swine of a boyfriend, who is taking her to a rock concert but is disgusted by the fact that she flying high with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds; later on, she is gang-raped by a carload of boys who had picked her up at the concert. Alexa is Good Medicine's true tragic figure, for while Timothy and Cathy run off to a commune in New York City for a few months (where, in a nice touch, they befriend the real-life hippie couple Groovy and Linda, who got their name in the news after they were murdered later that year), Alexa basically becomes a craven teen shut-in--the very thing her permanently injured brother could've become after the bike accident caused by his father's negligence, but did not.

Good Medicine not only implies, but shouts from the suburban New Jersey rooftops, that even in its early dawning the Age of Aquarius is far from invulnerable. This "Embryonic Journey" (to borrow from Jefferson Airplane) is a beautiful one, but frought with peril. Wohl is a master at depicting both inner and outer states of paradise, as well as how subsequent falls from grace influence two very different generations during the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century. Wohl has created in The Kind of Life That Was Being Lived triptych a protagonist who is on a par with Updike's Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. I, for one, cannot wait to see how Herschel Bluestein, his family, and the gallery of characters introduced in Good Medicine fare in Part Two.

Hi Arnie,
I am trying to get in touch with you. I am still in Manhattan, in the phone book. Glad to see you have finished part 1 and 2. Will order. Temma

Ms. Conoan-Arnold has written an intriguing piece that places its mark in the world of fantasy. The plot was exciting and suspenseful. The characters were well developed as well as believable. This book was hard to put down from the very beginning. I am anxiously awaiting her next novel.

Joins New Testament teachings and classic professional fund-raising methods to increase giving in your church.

Arnold Beisser,an avid tennis player, graduates medical school
and shortly thereafter contacts polio, goes through the iron lung regime, unexpectedly lives into his sixties (one of the last surviving victims of that era) and then life begins to get incredibly bleak. Read how life under such conditions is even possible and, learnedly, what are the options. Here is material to increase our humanity; here is a lesson in courage; here is grace in a place without comfort.

That's all the kids want, but their two grandmas are too busy with their conflicting parenting styles to let them get a word in edgewise. So they finally take things in their own hands and show their grandmas how careful they can be and have fun at the same time. My daughter enjoys the book very much [especially since I use the names she calls her grandmas] and imagines herself having fun with them at the lake. And I always laugh imagining my mother and mother in law trying to watch the kids alone together!

My kids read this over and over again in the days before Halloween.

Most of us had our first time reading about the age of exploration in grade school, and this book will make a second look more interesting. The author brings to light many unknowns, eccentric Europeans that risked their lives for the sake of knowledge, fame, riches, and all of the above. It is difficult to believe that historically this era of exploration is not so long ago. Two huge continents remained still largely unknown to the outside world until fairly recent times. The source of the Nile, an ancient mystery was only solved around the time of the American Civil War. The author covers the well known explorers like Pizarro, Cortez, and Cook and has a very skillful way of wandering off the storyline, in a good way. He mentions motives, anecdotes, ties up loose ends, or updates to the present to show the significance of the subject. Even though the book is dated, 1974, some of the theories discussed are still being debated, such as the origin and spread of syphilis, or the migration of the early Polynesian peoples. It is difficult to find a book containing the accounts of explorers such as Burton, Speke, and Captain James Cook.
The author also puts forth some of his own observations, one example being, that the two major cultures in the Americas at the time of the Spanish landing in the Americas, both had the myth of the light skinned, blue eyed bearded gods coming from the East, conversely Europe always had the myth that there is land to the West out in the Atlantic.
Well worth the read, for the main story or the interesting side stories

One of the facts that most amazed me when I was young was that by mixing different relative combinations of the colors red, yellow and blue it is possible to make all colors. That is the underlying theme of this book, although the joy of a colorful environment is also included.
The story begins in a village where everything is grey, including the moods of the people. However, a wizard mixes a potion that is blue, which fascinates the people of the town. In their festive mood, they paint everything blue and call it the great blueness.
Once the novelty wears off, the general mood of the populace becomes blue as nothing has really changed for them. Being bright and industrious, the wizard goes back to his cellar and makes yellow. His demonstration of the new color is a cause for celebration and once more the townspeople are over-zealous and paint everything yellow.
Once again, the novelty wears off and the people are bored with yellow. This causes the wizard to create red and the people are once again happy and paint everything red. As the collective boredom sets in once again, the people all start to argue and even took some of their anger out on the wizard. Finally, he goes back to his cellar and to his astonishment, he mixes the three colors and makes a complete rainbow of delightful tints. The townspeople have learned their lesson and use different colors so now the town is a kaleidoscope of colors.
This is a delightful children's book that stresses differences and how they make the world interesting. If it is followed by some information about color schemes, then the children will learn how the primary colors make everything.

This seven-part, 42-CD set is a thorough examination of the best- and lesser-known classics of American literature. In an eloquent Southern cadence, Professor Arnold Weinstein of Brown University gives thought-provoking lectures on American writers and their work, beginning with Benjamin Franklin and ending with Tony Morrison.

In addition to the works, themselves, Weinstein examines the relationships between the writers, and how each influenced the others' work. His lectures are couched within the framework of American history, revealing what makes these pieces uniquely American, and how the literature we read today was influenced by the events of our past.

Do you wish you'd learned more in those old English classes of your youth? This is a must-have for anyone who loves literature.