Jonah C. Sirott at the LARB:
Two recent books, Jim Newton’s Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening (2025) and Marc Raimondi’s Say Hello to the Bad Guys: How Professional Wrestling’s New World Order Changed America (2025), arrive as late explanations for that afternoon’s confusion. Both authors attempt to map an American delirium, and both operate under the seductive, microscopic delusion that their specific carnival, the jam band or the squared circle, is the hidden bellwether of history, the elusive thing that explains everything else. Newton wants to convince us that the Grateful Dead were the secret architects of a civic awakening, a band that offered a lived alternative to the Nixonian darkness. Raimondi, a seasoned ESPN reporter, wants to convince us that the wrestling faction New World Order (nWo), with their cynical “heel turn” in 1996, did not just change wrestling but also served as a dress rehearsal for our modern political collapse. To read them together is to be instructed that large, bearded men are responsible for everything.
Newton’s book is a monumental Jerry Garcia biography that doubles as a history of California’s political subconscious.
more here.
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