Before Occupy . . . there was Strike!
Besides Madison Avenue . . . there was Fun City.
Beyond Law and Order . . . there was Love and Peace.
New York in the 1960's: the famous, infamous, and not-so-famous marched and partied side by side; sexual liberation and political protest exploded; and the Music - above all, rock - opened the doors to everything.
For attorney Nate Kovacs, at first that hardly matters. His wife has just died of cancer and he's struggling to keep his family together. But a disastrous case at his old firm forces him to reinvent himself as a civil liberties lawyer, and that plunges him and his children, Artie and Karen, into all the city's cultural and political turmoil, especially when they befriend Danny Geller, an up-and-coming rock musician determined to break boundaries when it comes to drugs and potentially violent radical activism. Their involvement with the city's near-chaos and with Danny threatens to tear them apart and throws them into a legal battle that could end Nate's career.
Part family drama, part portrait of an era, and part the story of regular people, young and old, taking on some of the most powerful issues of their lifetimes in the courts, colleges, and streets of New York, CATS' EYES - from blackout to black light, from World's Fair to Woodstock - tells the story of a family and a city on the edge of enlightenment and madness, crisis and joy.
Michael Eric Stein's CATS' EYES takes us on an absolutely authoritative trip to New York City in the '60s, and it's though we had never seen it before. The novel offers an exuberant, cinematic treatment of that time and place's events and characters, some of which are real, and some of which are products of the author's imagination, which is so supercharged and fine-tuned that you can't tell the difference. We hear all kinds of voices from the period-students, photographers, musicians, lawyers, freaks. And we hear the music, too, in a way that rings true and clear. CATS' EYES offers readers a wild ride, and I urge them to take it. It's bumpy at times, and it's not always pleasant, but it's filled with emotion, verve, humor, and life, and it's not to be missed.
-Ben Yagoda, Author of How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them and About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made.
