Rating: 
Summary: Alaska on Acid
Review: Drop City is a highly entertaining book, but IMHO T.C. Boyle could easily have done even better. First of all the book seemed too short, the plot somewhat unbalanced. In the first half of the book we get separate introductions to the hippies in their original Californian habitat and the eccentric inhabitants of Boynton, a frontier town in the interior of Alaska. This covers about half of the whole book - it takes the hippies almost 240 out of more than 444 pages before they even arrive in Alaska. For my taste this was way too long. Plot-wise not too much happens - in California hippie heroine Star finds a new boy-friend, in Alaska two of the main characters, Sess and Pamela, get married. (There are several sub-plots, though - including a mother feeding her children LSD)In contrast to the laid-back first part of the book the second half moves at a very quick pace - The ending is violent and comes about 100 pages before it should have come, given the lengthy first half. (Another reviewer wrote the same thing and I agree with him) My second complaint is that the characters seemed one-dimensional. The central characters are two women that seem to be simultaneously pretty, intelligent, independent and caring.Their two male companions are almost as likeable, but less good-looking. Their opponents are two very evil guys - immediately recognizable as such.
Thus the outcome seemed predictable - even though the plot takes a number of typically Boylesque twists and turns. Still I liked the book a lot - it's very funny and some of the characters are very credible. The description of the Alaskan wilderness almost made me feel the mosquito bites and the intense cold.
Rating: 
Summary: thus far boyle's best novel
Review: Now of course this opinion is subjective, but I believe it to be true. I have been a rather huge fan of Boyle's going back quite some time. Anyone familiar with him will readily acknowledge that he is a terrific short story writer, but Boyle's novels, while generally excellent, always seem to provide some problem or another, be it ostentation or an over-extention of a premise. I know that as far as my own experiences with his novels I have always found myself excited by the idea of them but somehow disappointed in the end. Specifically with World's End, Riven Rock and The Road to Wellville (the three best prior to this one) I had been very excited to undertake them but found something lacking, if not in character or plot, but in the overall tone of the presentation. Here there was something deeper, a greater understanding of the characters having the adventures and perhaps a less aloof and condescending view of their actions. Drop City is a lovely book, a story about the unpreparedness of hippie culture for the shock of really living. The philosophies of any sort of radicalism (be it political or generally philosophical) are slowly chipped away at and undermined and what is left is the confusion of a person desperate to belong to something but confronted with the fact that there is more to being alive. Survival, eventually, outweighs every generous inclination and taking such woefully unprepared people and plopping them into the minus forty degree winter of the far reaches of the Alaskan wilderness gives Boyle an opportunity to explore the sincerity of basic young party animals on a proclaimed quest to 'live off the land'. There are several surprises in this story and the usual satiric tone is more subdued, the struggles and the drama of having nowhere else to go infusing this story with a deeper understanding of humanity than anything I have previously read by Boyle. A wonderful novel that makes a rather apolitical statement about the fusion of everyday life and political activism and a haunting and powerful family drama about life on the edge of civilization.
Rating: 
Summary: Should be classified as "Historical Fiction"
Review: This book is the second that I have read of TC Boyles'. I am impressed with his ability to convey concern about social issues in very subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I found myself thinking about gender, class, and the status quo after reading each of the books that I have read by him. Drop City is the story of two different groups of people whose lives eventually converge. Set in 1970, there is a commune of hippies on the Northern California coast and far north, a geographical area and its inhabitants in Alaska. TC Boyle outlines the differences and the sameness of these two groups and it is truly interesting to witness the impact that each has on the other. I would say that Boyle's weakness, at least to me, is in his physical character descriptions. Being a very visual person, I like to see the people who inhabit the book in my mind. I find his physical descriptions of people lacking but not so his descriptions of nature. All in all, VERY worthwhile to read!!
Rating:
Summary: Great read from TC Boyle
Review: I'm an Alaskan, born and raised... I grew up much like I imagine Sess and Pamela's kids would, and I have to say that TC Boyle is the only author from Outside who's ever written about Alaska and gotten it RIGHT. I thought this was a stupendously entertaining read... at 27, I'm way too young to have been a hippie, so I can't speak to the accuracy of Boyle's portrayal of the late 60s counterculture. However, I can say from a great deal of personal experience that his portrayal of Interior Alaska, its landscapes, its white people, its Indian people, and their lifestyles is absolutely spot-on. He even mentioned the Chena Pumphouse restaurant by name, which is one of my favorite places to drink beer and shoot pool. Don't listen to the bad reviews... If you want to read about the REAL Alaska, Drop City is right up there with Shadows on the Koyukuk, The Big Garage on Clear-Shot, and Alaska's Wolf Man.
Rating:
Summary: Drop in to Drop City
Review: All you ever wanted to know about hippies and communal living in is this hefty novel, which despite some tedious passages, is overall a good, engrossing read. Drop City California, a sloppy farm full of sloppy buildings and free-lovin' hippies is forced to move when its founder, Norm Sender, runs into various troubles with the authorities. The hippies pile into a school bus bound for Alaska, the last American frontier, where they believe they'll be able to do their own thing, live off the land and life will be groovy. Of course, the cold, inhospitable wilderness of Alaska doesn't prove to be so welcoming, and group tensions that were simmering in California quickly boil over, and some of Drop City's residents drop out or part ways. The story is mostly told through the viewpoints of lovely, idealistic Star, her sleazy ex-boyfriend Ronnie, and Marco, Star's new, improved man. We also see Alaska from the perspective of locals Cecil and Pamela Harper, whose newlywed lives get a little jolt with the influx of hippies. Drop City is a fascinating study of group dynamics, societal dropouts and wilderness survival. My only complaint was that there seemed to be so many characters it was often hard to keep track of them all, and the multiple perspectives kept me from being able to really get to know any one character very well.
Rating:
Summary: a good, light read
Review: the reviewers who are complaining need to realize that T. C. Boyle writes FICTION. As with all his books, he begins with two separate stories that somehow converge. and living in alaska does involve gruesome animal death - ask the folks who live where no roads go and the sun doesn't shine for days. I loved his portrayal of alaska and found it to be one of the most real I've read. His characters aren't people you entirely love, hmmmm just like the real world. I did identify with some of the women. They are idealists and idealists make a lot of mistakes. I enjoyed the scenery and the dialogue. I love Boyle and enjoyed the book immensely. It wasn't a hippie memoir - wasn't all about drugs and sex- it's about people and relationships and how life itself affects those relationships.
Rating: 
Summary: Drop City
Review: I just finished Drop City and I have to say it's completely forgettable. I cared for none of the characters and was quite disturbed by the author's fixation on gruesome, harsh animal death. Sure I understand that it is the wild wilderness and all, but hitting a horse, salacious details of a writhing porcupine, wolf's broken spinal cord, etc. etc. The ending tells us that Marco, Star, Cess, and Pamela live happily ever after? It ends with Cess riding his dogs, on his way to the Christmas celebration at Drop City North; who cares! what happens to Drop City in the long term? The author is surely thrown in personal vendettas, as the "bad people" wioll always lose to the "good people." The only truly well developed character is Norm, and he disaapears from the story without a trace.
Rating:
Summary: Boyle's Best Yet
Review: Boyle rivals John Steinbeck's ability to create characters who would frighten and repel the average reader, and then make that reader care about the fate of those characters. This story taps all of Boyle's best talents.
Rating: 
Summary: Negative stereotypes and sensationalism
Review: This book tells it like it never was. The best thing about it is the cover picture(taken from *Aquarian Odyssey* by Don Synder). But it's all down hill from there. The author, it seems, has an agenda. He's supposedly showing and telling the nitty gritty of hippie communal life in the '60s and '70s as if it were an historical novel, which it isn't. Instead, his creation is a condemnatory cartoon from hell - the Zap comix version. The author takes snippets of actual lifestyles and happenings of the period and weaves it into a complete fabrication and caricature, not readily apparent to anyone who has not lived through and participated of the communal life of the era. Nowhere is there mention of the new social order attempted or the continuation of that social order in hundreds of communes that survive to the present time. Boyle takes the name 'Drop City' from an actual commune in Colorado by that name, famous for its geodesic Buckminster Fuller domes, but this fictional commune is nothing like the original Drop City. There is never any mention of spiritual values and practices observed at the time. Instead, the people portrayed are uniformly stupid, immature and degenerate.
Boyle pulls in worst-case scenarios from several different communes and makes up the rest. It's true that there were drugs used (but not the endless supply of marijuana, hallucinogens, uppers and downers that Boyle's Drop City folks always have). It's true that love was free (what kind of love isn't free anyway?) but not the mandate to 'ball' anyone and everyone as in Boyle's Drop City. Incidentally, the words 'cat', 'chicks' and 'ball' are all East Coast words of the late '50s and early '60s. Boyle shows that he's 10 years behind the times and geographically unhip when he insists on using these words so frequently in referring to a West Coast commune. Sounds like he's imitating Tommy Chong's stoner spoofs. He's similarly sloppy throughout. He has communards gathering peyote 'buds' in the hills of California where peyote doesn't grow and never did, and he has rattlesnakes appearing where there are no rattlesnakes and never were. It's ludicrous when he talks about voluntary poverty in one breath and then has the hippies eating eggs, toast and juice for breakfast, tahini casseroles and baloney sandwiches for lunch, home-canned goods and three-course dinners for supper with plenty of cookies and brownies all the time. Three meals a day, when the most that any truly poor commune manages is two meals a day.
And it's downright silly when he has everybody puffing away on tailor-made cigarettes. Most people in communes don't smoke tobacco (too expensive), but when they do, they're always roll-your-owns. And how about all that underwear? Nobody that I know of wore underwear in rural communes of the times. So then he has these supposedly poor but actually rich hippies moving to Alaska, after Drop City is bulldozed by the health department. I've never been to Alaska and don't know the country or people, but it's a safe bet from the inaccuracies of his portrayal of Northern California that he also misrepresented the Native Americans of Alaska. There is no mention here of their ancient culture and values. Here, he says that they're all drunken, debauched, savage and filthy. It's a shame that Boyle couldn't have turned his considerable narrative talents to another genre. I say this because he does know his craft. If he had a science background, he would probably be an excellent science fiction writer. As it is, the characters in this novel are purposely shallow and two-dimensional because of his hidden agenda. If you didn't know anything about his subject, you'd think it was a good read. Actually, it's a stunt and a disappointment. After all the glowing reviews, I want to add this note of dissent. It could have been better ' a LOT better. For openers, it could have been REAL.
Rating:
Summary: A Life in Nature
Review: T.C. Boyle has shrewdly set his new novel "Drop City" in 1970, three years after The Summer of Love 1967, for it was about this time that the Hippie movement started to sour. Brotherhood, Free Love, Flowers in your hair gave way to the ugly realities of the Draft and the Vietnam War. Whereas, the 60's ideal was a reaching out and hugging your fellow man, the 70's became a time of hugging yourself. A time of: What's-in-it-for-me?
Drop City is a commune that has set up shop in the Central Valley of California but soon is forced to move, because of community pressure and run-ins with the law, to Alaska... the last frontier. As in every community, Drop City is peopled (Norm, Star, Marco, Ronnie...the leaders) by a wide variety of personalities each of who have their own personal agenda.
As a contrast to the free-lovin', drug ingesting, partner swapping, vegetarian cuisine eating milieu of the commune, " Drop City" also tells the story of the earnest, hard-working, meat eating, fur trapping, albeit hard drinking denizens of the "Thirty Mile" area of Alaska especially as personified by Pamela and her husband Sess. It is inevitable that these two factions will collide but Boyle has gone out of his way to also point out the similarities between the two. As Pamela says of Drop City people: "It was amazing-they were also so naïve, so starry-eyed and simplistic, filled right up to the eyeballs with crack-brained notions about everything from the origins of the universe to the brotherhood of man...they were children, utterly confident and utterly ignorant-even Norm Sender, and he must have been forty years on this planet. They should have known better. All of them." Sess and Pamela, though well aware of the realities of living in the wild, are open enough to accept the Drop City people...to not only give them a chance but also to guide and teach them. Boyle shows no preference to either faction and you sense that his heart is divided between both camps.
Sess Harder is, to say the least an interesting character, a hero really. He is physically and morally strong. He is a combination of Paul Bunyan and Henry David Thoreau. In fact, Boyle quotes Thoreau's "Ktaadin" at the beginning of Part Six: "This was the Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night." Sess, committed to his survival and to his way of life refuses money offered by the Drop City people to take them to town instead of tending to his traps: ..."cash was cash, but the trap line came first because once you set those traps you were obligated by every moral force there was in the universe to tend them, if only to curtail the moral suffering of the living beings that gave you your sustenance, because you didn't waste, you never wasted-waste was worse than a sin; it was death." These are strong, humane and heroic words.
"Drop City" is fascinating: full of interesting and diverse characters in unusual and intriguing situations. Boyle's prose is fat and juicy yet sharp and incisive. It is obvious, especially after his "Friends of the Earth" that Boyle has an agenda in regards to the planet on which we live but he never lets that get in the way of his telling a good story with characters that live on in your mind even after the last word of the last page is read.
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