Showing results by author "William Morrison" in All Categories

London’s East End has over the centuries been a magnet for immigration, innovation, culture, crime and a vast spectrum of other things. It is often seen as both part of and yet very distinct from the vast metropolis of London. Today it has been transformed from the often grimy, derelict and overcrowded area, that many of these stories describe, into a landscape of gentrification, sleek and shiny buildings and a booming economy. But here such noted talents as Arthur Morrison, Henry W. Nevinson, William Pett Ridge and Thomas Burke show the East End as it really was.

From the baseball playgrounds of Little League in the conservative fifties, through the Summer of Love and the radical sixties, to the last days of the Vietnam War, Luck of the Draw is the story of four idealistic boomers coming of age while looking for love and trying to change the world.

In a luckier universe, in which the Kennedys were not assassinated and the Vietnam War ended before it began, we find President Richard Nixon and Dr. Timothy Leary, the escaped convict Nixon calls “the most dangerous man in the world” for turning America’s youth into no-good hippies. Nixon is the same profane, venal S-O-B that made him such a hit in our universe, but here he is unleashed in a world where there was no Vietnam war to slow him down and Watergate is just a fancy hotel.