About The Book
Other books by Robert Coe
Memoir, cultural criticism and personal history told with a journalist’s eye and an artist’s curiosity.
MY ROCK LIFE and Other Musical Notes
Music can bring back a room, a road, a person, or an entire season before the first chorus ends. MY ROCK LIFE and other musical notes: The Autobiography of a Non-Musician tells the story of the author’s life through the music he listened to and lived inside. The music that surrounds us all is one version of the story of our lives.
Survivors of a Future That Never Happened
a cultural review, 1974 – 1994 (2022) is a collection of eighteen articles and essays, some previously published in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, American Theater magazine, and Tricycle: the Buddhist Review. This review is mostly about the live and visual arts, but also art neighborhoods, skydiving, poetry, ceramics, barbecue restaurants, cultural theory, Freudian psychology, women’s bodybuilding, Buddhism, Postmodernism, and the politics of race and revolution.
“...an astonishing blend of cultural history, multi-arts criticism, and memoir, moving with dazzling fluency across the hybrid worlds of visual and performance art, dance and music-theater, and experimental just-about-everything... Coe celebrates the mad pioneers of America’s most surreal cultural era in a gorgeous, insightful prose that matches their marvels.”
Todd London, This Is Not My Memoir (with Andre Gregory, FSG)JOCK: A Memoir of The Counterculture
JOCK: A Memoir of the counterculture is a spiritual autobiography about collegiate track and field, major college football, Olympic swimming, and big-time college sports generally in the psychedelic/anti-war rebellion. While ultimately a personal coming-of-age story and the experience of being a Division I college distance runner, JOCK is also an unexpurgated account of how the counterculture – anti-authoritarianism, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll – interacted with a realm that was supposedly its polar opposite: big-time college athletics.
“What magnificent, important work… I can clearly imagine you and me continuing our talk about the meanings and paradoxes of sporting effort, community and service, and me inviting you to train in Eugene after the ’72 trials. Where I would have tried to shake you out of the provably erroneous assumption that four college years were all you were allowed for a career…”
Kenny Moore, two-time Olympic Marathoner and a thirty-year veteran journalist covering the running scene for Sports Illustrated .I was fascinated, entertained, and captivated by the chance to journey into another time, if not entirely another place, in the history of distance running.
Miles Unterreiner, Stanford Class of ’12, Rhodes Scholar, two-time All-American runnerRead this book regardless of your present or past athleticism, politics, or age. This book captures the spirit and feeling of a time of profound change in American society.
Brian Mittelstaedt, Four-Minute Miler“…The detail with which he recounts his story and the emotion that spills onto the page — the elation of a breakthrough race, the disappointment of a poor one — make it an interesting read…. Coe does a stellar job of recreating the past, immersing the reader in the emerging counterculture….. Coe’s entertaining style and the endless supply of amusing anecdotes (make the book engaging.)”
Jonathan Gault, letsrun.com“Those looking for a ‘pure’ running book will find it in Jock: a memoir of the counterculture. With Robert Coe’s careful eye, you get a stunningly detailed look into the life of a competitive collegiate runner during one of the most tumultuous phases that the United States has endured. However, those looking for only a running book are in for a surprise as Coe takes us on a journey through the late-sixties and into the seventies… Set at Stanford from Coe’s first days entering the campus to his final year, the narrative winds through the cross country season to the classroom, out onto the track, and eventually as far away as Stanford-in-Britain. Coe's journey is neither smooth nor straight, as befit the period in which he competed…Coe does not pull punches… Jock looks at the life of the athlete from an intimate perspective. Unlike the tightly controlled legend of [Steve] Prefontaine, Coe ranges far and wide in an authentic effort to provide sense to running as it related to the age. In this lies the meat of Coe memoir, a blatant openness that peels back the veneers to expose the vicissitudes of the protest generation…”
Paul Duffau, blogger and novelist, Finishing Kick and Trail of Second Chances