Musician, journalist, and Boston native RYAN WALSH will read from and discuss his book ASTRAL WEEKS: A Secret History of 1968 (Penguin Press), a mind-expanding dive into a lost chapter of 1968, featuring the famous and forgotten: Van Morrison, folkie-turned-cult-leader Mel Lyman, Timothy Leary, James Brown, and many more.
Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is an iconic rock album shrouded in legend, a masterpiece that has touched generations of listeners and influenced everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Martin Scorsese. Walsh unearths the album’s fascinating backstory—along with the untold secrets of the time and place that birthed it: Boston 1968.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.