Obit for Manuela Hoelterhoff 

By Dave Shiflett

In the course of every hack writer's life, with any luck, a great editor will appear. In my fortunate case that editor was Manuela Hoelterhoff, who died May 6 from cancer. She was 77.

We were entirely different people. She was born in Hamburg just after World War II (or 11, as our better public intellectuals might put it). Her father was one of 5,000 or so German survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad, where hundreds of thousands of fellow soldiers died. After the family came to America, her mother got a job at the Tolstoy Foundation, run by the great writer's daughter. By contrast my dad served in the Pacific theater, then started out his career in a gas station. My mother was a public school teacher.

Manuela was bright and ambitious. She wrote a few articles for William F. Buckley's National Review and then, in 1975, joined the Wall Street Journal, where she stayed for over 20 years in various capacities, including book editor. She won a Pulitzer in 1983 for criticism, in which she truly excelled, once writing of a Metropolitan Opera performance that "the place was so empty I thought I'd missed an air-raid drill."

She also had a heart as warm as a Christmas fire.

By comparison I sounded frightfully like Gomer Pyle, was an academic slacker, and a journalistic nonentity. My biggest scoop had been an alleged Bigfoot sighting near the Dismal Swamp in Virginia. That résumé enhancer was followed by employment with an even more exotic being—the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a.k.a. the Korean Lunar Deity, whose Washington Times had given me a job, unaware that when asked how many Supreme Court justices there were (just prior to ascending to Washington), I answered "a dozen."

Nonetheless, she smiled upon me. An early assignment was to review Roseanne Barr's My Life As a Woman. My analysis was somewhat mundane, reaching its high point when observing the author possessed a pair of "billowing glutes the size of sofa cushions." This didn't seem to offend Manuela, and indeed might have pleased her, as it did famed producer Ray Stark, who called (there was no email) to praise the piece and ask if I'd like to try my hand at Hollywood writing. Being an ignorant rube who didn't, at the time, know Stark's glorious reputation (West Side Story, Funny Girl, Steel Magnolias), I turned him down.

Manuela and I worked off and on for years. I had not heard from her for awhile when, in 2004, she called out of the blue. "Shiflett," she said (she often started conversations by calling my name), "what are you doing these days?" Not much, I honestly replied. "Well, you are now the television critic for the Bloomberg Muse. Where are you living?"

"Richmond."

"Where on earth is Richmond?"

The job was a breeze. I wrote one 600-word column a week and made a solid middle-class living. She let me review whatever I wanted, but there was one unspoken commandment: Do not bore me. She could be demanding but was also forgiving. One day I got another call:

"Shiflett, where did you learn to spell? It's KAMA Sutra, not KARMA Sutra." This inspired one of my better comebacks, which I attribute to her influence:

"Manuela, I am a writer, not a speller."

While she often broadened my horizons, I sometimes broadened hers. One day Manuela came down to Washington to interview some art world deity. We had lunch, after which she asked for a lift to her appointment. It was a sweltering D.C. summer afternoon—hot, damp, the sort of weather only an anaconda could love. "I hope you've got a good air conditioner," she said as we approached my car.

As it happened, my AC was taking the summer off, and I had gone old school. "It works like this," I explained as we pulled out of the parking garage. "You put down your window and I'll step on the gas."

Manuela was not amused.

We shared a love of music, though her love was far more elevated than mine. She wrote the libretto for an opera (Modern Painters) while I created what one critic called "Gonzo folk" with titles like "Virgins in Heaven." Yet she was entirely supportive. One evening, while still in the grips of youthful ambition, a colleague and I played a gig at a Columbia University venue. Just after taking the stage I noticed Manuela and then-partner Francesca Zambello in the audience. I gasped so profoundly my uvula could likely be heard slapping against the back of my throat.

This was hardly an overreaction. Manuela was a Pulitzer-winning opera critic and creator while Francesca was a world-renowned director who worked with the greats, including Placido Domingo. I sang like a drunk monkey and kept time like a sundial on a rainy day.

After the gig, I sheepishly approached their highnesses. Manuela could not have been nicer, with Francesca adding that "your voice fits the room." It was only later that I remembered the venue, which was below a chapel, was popularly known as the Crypt.

I had just finished (I hope) rewriting a novel the day Manuela died. I hadn't talked to her in a while. Her love life had gone bad, her beloved Beagles had died, she'd been battling cancer, and I wasn't feeling that great myself. I might have dared to send her the title page (Three Clicks Past the Paraclete) to see what she thought.

I can imagine her response. "Shiflett—you're groping for profundity. Try again. But don't give up!"

She now belongs to the ages, and the ages had better watch their step.

Dave Shiflett is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com

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Ozzy Osbourne with his son Jack in 1985. (Photo by Mike Maloney/Mirrorpix via Getty Images) Mike Maloney/Mirrorpix via Getty Images

Readers of a certain age may recall significant disenchantment at the 1970 release of Black Sabbath’s song “Iron Man,” which was said to be an exercise in aural dentistry, sans Novocain, unleashed by a band of devil worshipers. Yet many naysayers eventually cottoned to Sabbath’s singer, Ozzy Osbourne. Two new books may explain why.

For one thing, Ozzy (born John Michael Osbourne on Dec. 3, 1948) was a scrapper. As he tells us in “Last Rites”—co-written with Chris Ayres and published after Osbourne’s death in July—he grew up with his parents and five siblings in a neighborhood still bearing the scars inflicted by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Their public housing was without indoor plumbing. Young Ozzy’s future seemed similarly bleak. He struggled at school and at burglary, the latter for which he earned a short prison sentence. Among his early legitimate jobs was at a local slaughterhouse dispatching animals with a bolt gun.

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Last Rites

 

 

Yet he had his dreams. At 19 he joined the Polka Tulk Blues Band, named after the brand of talcum powder favored by his mother. Black Sabbath, named after a horror movie, soon followed and made Osbourne rich enough to develop world-class alcohol and drug regimens. These habits would get him fired from the band a decade later and plague him during his long solo career.

Excess was a core feature of Osbourne’s brand, like Dean Martin and his martinis multiplied by a thousand or two. At one point, we learn, Osbourne drank four bottles of cognac a day; at other times he made do with a bottle of vodka chased by enough codeine to drop a water buffalo. Cocaine was constant. Yet he humbly admits to being something of a piker compared to John Bonham, Led Zeppelin’s drummer and Osbourne’s drinking pal, who once drank 40 shots of liquor in one day (his last). In the same spirit, Lemmy Kilmister, the singer-bassist for Motörhead, might stay up 10 days and nights buzzing on methamphetamine and Jack Daniel’s. But head and shoulders above the rest, we are told, was André the Giant, the professional wrestler. “The guy would drink whole jugs of vodka and cranberry,” Osbourne tells us, “and while he was sitting there, waiting for ’em to be made, he’d get through a six-pack of beer. The guy was physically incapable of getting drunk.”

Indulgence came at the usual price: addiction and a bitter harvest of regrets. Osbourne kicks himself especially hard for the mistreatment of his also-famous wife. “I’d be dead without Sharon,” he writes, while also recalling his 1989 attempt to strangle her after returning home from the Moscow Music Peace Festival. Infidelity also strained the marriage, which, like his boozing and doping, he blames on addiction, “a disease that keeps telling you you don’t have a disease.”

He could also be rough on animals. Osbourne retells the infamous story of orally beheading an unsuspecting bat. He doesn’t mention an earlier admission, of shooting 17 cats during a drug binge. All of this in support of his Prince of Darkness schtick. Yet there’s another side to the story: Osbourne could also be a generous, friendly, fun-loving bloke—at least according to Stephen Rea’s “Ozzy & Me.”

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Ozzy & Me: Life Lessons, Wild Stories, and Unexpected Epiphanies from Forty Years of Friendship with the Prince of Darkness

 

 

Mr. Rea, a former journalist from the U.K. who now teaches writing in New Orleans, met his music idol at age 15 after his mother wrote Osbourne’s staff about a 1985 concert in Rio de Janeiro. A 40-year friendship between Osborne and Mr. Rea followed, one that allowed the writer to travel the world as part of the singer’s inner circle. “I’ve been to hundreds of shows on all six inhabited continents,” Mr. Rea writes, and anyone seeking the skinny on Osbourne’s performance at, say, the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, N.J., on Jan. 18, 1996 (plus many others) will find Mr. Rea’s detailed and affectionate book an invaluable resource. One of the more captivating performances occurred in Carterville, Ill., on Aug. 21, 2017, when a wealthy winery owner paid Osbourne “a fortune” to sing “Bark at the Moon” and other songs during a solar eclipse. The experience left Mr. Rea feeling “like I was whisked to another universe in a different dimension.”

Those were the days—and Mr. Rea misses them. (“What are the odds a teen admirer will write to Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift and become friends?”) He recalls Osbourne’s somewhat dismaying encounter with a woman who recognized him from his reality television show, “The Osbournes,” but was unaware he was a singer. All told, Ozzy sold more than 100 million recordings.

His latter years were blighted by maladies, including heart problems, Parkinson’s disease, and memory and hearing loss. He also developed vibrant viewpoints based on a lifetime of research. Nicotine, Osbourne warns in “Last Rites,” is “the most addictive substance I’ve ever put into my body” while marijuana is a “gateway drug” whose legalization is “a disaster waiting to happen.” While he sported multiple tattoos, these days “people are tattooing their entire faces—and then having surgery to remove their lips and ears, so they look like aliens.” Ergo, “how’s your kid gonna feel when you’re reading him ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ with a full-face skull tattoo and no nose?” He has long denied being a Satan worshipper, as some critics insisted, and he once told an interviewer he was a baptized Christian.

Suddenly this Ozzy sounds like the husband of that long-ago Harriet.

Like Keith Richards, Osbourne often spoke in an endearingly incoherent patois, every other word an F-bomb, which he helped normalize and eventually diminished through overuse. He also found respectability. At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2002, he proudly recalls, President George W. Bush revealed that his mother, the beloved Silver Fox, “was a huge Sabbath fan.” Osbourne might regret drinking three bottles of wine and jumping onto his table during the festivities that evening, but he did have a role to play.

Final words? He suggested these for his tombstone. “I told you I wasn’t feeling well.” Pitch perfect, maestro.

 

Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com. 

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the October 18, 2025, print edition as 'Ozzy’s Odyssey'.

 

WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEW-- BEAR WITH ME

 

A world bereft of an academic appraisal of celebrity bears would somehow seem deficient, so a growl of appreciation is due Daniel Horowitz, whose “Bear With Me” tells us tons about Teddy, Smokey, Pooh, Paddington and even the dreadful Berenstains.

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Bear With Me: A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America

 

 

Mr. Horowitz, a professor emeritus of American studies at Smith College and a prolific author, tells us early on that bears appear in the Bible maybe 14 times while lions, sheep and goats get hundreds of mentions. But as the years passed bears came on strong, inspiring Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear, A.A. Milne’s Pooh and William Faulkner’s Old Ben. Bears also caught the eye of guys who knew how to make the truly big bucks, including stuffed-animal entrepreneurs, P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney.

Bear superstars get plenty of ink. The ubiquitous Teddy, for instance, was created out of a marriage of mercy and capitalist enthusiasm. The story began when Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear during a 1902 Mississippi hunt (his guide was a former slave named Holt Collier, who had been a Confederate scout). T.R. blasted plenty of animals but killing this bear, which Collier had subdued and tied to a tree, would have been more an execution than a legitimate act of killing for sport.

The press initially mauled the president for his refusal to dispatch the animal (it appears Collier might have later done the deed with a knife) but in the wilds of Brooklyn, N.Y., a Jewish immigrant couple saw an opportunity and created a stuffed “Teddy’s Bear” they displayed in their candy-store window. Roosevelt reportedly approved their request to use his name to market the stuffed bears (other manufacturers soon followed suit) and the rest is history.

Some human-bear relationships got off to even rockier starts. Hugh Glass, who was attacked by a grizzly in 1823 and allegedly crawled 200 miles for help, inspired several books in his day and at least two films in ours, including “The Revenant” (2015). John “Grizzly” Adams, a mid-19th-century member of the Adams family (which also produced two U.S. presidents) was mauled early on yet eventually came to consider grizzlies his “faithful friends”—and income streams. He joined forces with Barnum, who later wrote about a bear-wrestling exhibition in Mariposa, Calif., that netted Adams $800—real money back then. Adams’s storied life, which may have been cut short by complications from his earlier injuries, would feather many Hollywood nests.

Mr. Horowitz wags an academic tongue, noting that Teddy Bears eventually transitioned, in some quarters at least, from “stuffed animals resting next to a child” to “objects of critical assessments through their association with imperialism and the patriarchy.” He lashes Rudyard Kipling for the author’s “imperial colonizer” instincts, though Mr. Horowitz adds that Baloo, the bear in Kipling’s “Jungle Book” (1894), was a wise teacher who, in Walt Disney’s devious hands, “echoed American racial stereotypes.” In a similar spirit, Uncle Remus and his tales of Brer Bear, from the late-19th-century folktales created by Joel Chandler Harris, “confirmed an image of black inferiority many whites needed,” according to the writer Julius Lester. When viewed through enlightened eyes, Mr. Horowitz tells us, “bear narratives illuminate issues of gender, race, and imperialism.”

Readers who would rather hear about Paddington than the patriarchy may experience intense eye-rolling from time to time. Yet Mr. Horowitz also provides interesting bear facts: Some can run up to 30 miles an hour; and while grizzlies can kill you, attacks are rare. In one 90-year stretch at Glacier National Park in Montana, the author writes, nine people died from bear attacks while 48 drowned, 23 fell from cliffs and 26 perished in auto accidents.

Yet some bears are constant nuisances, and not simply due to a love of dumpster diving. Exhibit A: The Berenstains.

Stan Berenstain and Janice Grant wrote the instructional parenting book “Have a Baby, My Wife Just Had a Cigar” (1960) before becoming bear authors, helped along by Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, who at the time was working as an editor at Random House. Geisel, a man of his times, suggested Uncle Remus as a model for a new animal-based series. The world was soon up to its nose in Berenstains: As Mr. Horowitz tells us, there are now more than 300 books about the Berenstain family, with over 260 million copies sold since 1962.

A resistance of sorts eventually formed. Mr. Horowitz generously quotes Charles Krauthammer on the dreadfulness unleashed by this clan of “lumbering cuddlies.” Mama Bear is “the final flowering of the grade-school prissy” while Papa Bear is “the Alan Alda of grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like Batman.” Many readers may be tearfully reminded of how much we miss Charles Krauthammer.

Mr. Horowitz finds time for Yogi Bear, who originated in 1958; the Gummi Bears, who came along in 1985; Fozzie Bear from the Muppets; and Garfield’s Pooky. We also meet bears recruited for environmental causes, including Smokey, the arch-foe of forest fires, and Bi-Polar Bear, from the animated web series Queer Duck, who is part of what Mr. Horowitz describes as a “gay bear subculture” whose members are “hairy, hefty, and aging.”

We may even experience a provoked thought, perhaps while contemplating Mr. Horowitz’s wariness of “cultural appropriation.” If authors should only write from perspectives reflecting their gender, race, sexual and other dispositions, shouldn’t “Winnie-the-Pooh” have been written, or at least co-written, by a bear? Perhaps a question to give us legitimate paws.

 

Mr. Shiflett reviews frequently for the Journal and posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com.

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the August 20, 2025, print edition as 'An Omnibus Of the Ursine'.

WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEW OF ‘SUBMERSED’

BY DAVE SHIFLETT 

Rare be the ones whose greatest passion is to submerge themselves in small, homemade submarines, daring bad luck, bad engineering or perhaps an ill-tempered providence (or pilot) to transform them into clouds of bloody slime.

Yet as Matthew Gavin Frank deftly illustrates in “Submersed: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines,” the last fate awaited the passengers of the Titan, which in 2023 infamously imploded during an attempt to explore the wreckage of the Titanic—a finale, Mr. Frank intriguingly adds, that might not have been an accident.

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Submersed: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines

By Matthew Gavin Frank

Pantheon

320 pages

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Mr. Frank augments his captivating murder dramas with historical forays, among them examinations of Aristotle’s and Alexander the Great’s interest in diving bells, as well as the first submarine (the Confederate H.L. Hunley) to sink a ship. He also provides a long recounting of the U.S. military’s slow embrace of female submariners.

Mr. Frank’s deep dive into the world of personal submersibles, or PSUBS, finds a variegated cast of characters, including Peter Madsen, who is now permanently docked in a Danish prison for an on-sub murder.

Madsen’s crime provides the page-turning core to “Submersed.” A do-it-yourself prodigy, he built rockets before he constructed his UC3 Nautilus; launched in 2008, at the time the Nautilus was the largest personal submarine in existence. According to Mr. Frank, Madsen had a youthful infatuation with the 1981 U-Boat drama “Das Boot” and also admired his fellow U-boat enthusiast Adolf Hitler. His work was supported by patrons ($200,000 was donated for the Nautilus project), and while his intense and sometimes theatrical personality drew admirers, employees considered him a tyrant. Former acquaintances quipped that every time Madsen’s name was spoken at their clubhouse, “the sprinkler system starts.”

Madsen’s victim, Kim Wall, was a 30-year-old Swedish journalist who had enjoyed success as a diplomat and whose work appeared in the New York Times and the Guardian. It was her adventurous nature and unfortunate timing that led to her demise. In 2017 she asked Madsen for an interview, which he granted on April 10 after a female acquaintance of his turned down an invitation to join him for a cruise. The night before the interview, Mr. Frank reports, Madsen searched the internet for information on “executions and dismemberment,” “beheading,” “girl” and “agony.” According to his conviction, he murdered Ms. Wall hours after they met.

Summer Books: The Best Reading for the Season

 

From a visit with Old West gunslingers to submarine voyages deep below the waves, these books offer escapes of all kinds.

Madsen may have been a brilliant engineer but he was a lousy liar. He initially insisted that he had dropped off Ms. Wall shoreside—alive—after completing the interview, but when video evidence contradicted him he insisted she had died on board due to an accident. What happened to the body? He buried it at sea, he explained, because its presence disturbed him. It was later discovered he had dismembered his victim—which was necessary, Madsen said, because he couldn’t haul her body intact up to the hatch.

Mr. Frank has an eye for the unique, as reflected in his earlier books on diamond smuggling, pot farming and the giant squid. He works hard for his readers, sometimes immersing them in awe-inspiring levels of context and detail. He tells us, for instance, that Ms. Wall shared her birthday with the anniversary of Patrick Henry’s “liberty or death” speech, the beginning of Lewis and Clark’s return journey east, and the birthdays of Joan Crawford and Chaka Khan. Among those who died on the same day as Ms. Wall’s birth, the author adds, was Olev Roomet, “the world’s only remaining player of the ancient Estonian bagpipe, the torupill.” In a similar spirit we learn that Jules Verne, the author of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” (1870), exchanged 680 often-disputatious letters with his publisher, and that the stapedius muscle, located in the ear, is not only the smallest human muscle but dampens innate bodily noises—which would otherwise be “so overwhelming” that it would “drive us mad.”

While the PSUBS community is mostly male, Mr. Frank tracks down Shanee Stopnitzky, a “non-dude” enthusiast who says she’s “spent a year of my life underwater, in aggregate.” Her home waters around the marina in Berkeley, Calif., Mr. Frank memorably adds, contain the cremated remains of many local paupers whose names may be unknown but who left behind a slightly gruesome detritus, including fire-resistant dentures and “metal screws and plates” that once held their bones in place.

Mr. Frank saves the story of the Titan’s demise for the latter part of his book. The doomed submersible was piloted by Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, who promised, for a crisp $250,000 each, to take his passengers down to the wreckage of the Titanic, more than 12,000 feet beneath the waves. The tickets were assumed to be for a round trip but, according to Karl Stanley, a fellow submariner (and former guest in a state mental hospital), the implosion was not an accident. Mr. Stanley insists that Rush had purposefully built “a mousetrap for billionaires” and hoped to be eternally associated with the Titanic drama. “He set a new standard for going out with a bang,” Mr. Stanley concludes.

Mr. Frank does not endorse the mass-murder scenario, though he does leave readers with one more reason to avoid snooping around deep-water shipwrecks. The water pressure at 12,000 feet below sea level—18 million pounds on the entire body, we are told—“in under a millisecond, rendered the bodies of the five passengers to gel” that was sucked through ruptures in the submarine and “dispersed into the brine.”

All of which brings to mind an expression associated with the nautical superstar Long John Silver: Shiver me timbers.

 

Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com. 

Review: On The Hippie Trail – Rick Steves 

In 1978 the 23-year-old Rick Steves, then a piano teacher, decided to “wallop my norms” and, along with his pal and future business collaborator Gene Openshaw, set out on a 3,000-mile journey from Istanbul to Kathmandu. It was a long and sometimes strange trip that, he assures us in “On the Hippie Trail,” was worth every beggar, pirate, parasite and other native phenomenon he encountered along the way. 

Mr. Steves, known far and wide for his public-television and radio travel shows, newspaper columns, guidebooks and more, had forgotten about his travel journal from that 1978 trip. He rediscovered it during the Covid-19 lockdown and lightly revised it for “On the Hippie Trail.” Amusing, poignant and sometimes inspirational, it reflects a spirit of youthful wanderlust that’s a bit edgier than the polished presentation Mr. Steves provides as a latter-day travel guru.

Fear not: This is no stoner odyssey, though the author does lose his “marijuana virginity” partway through the journey. His text and photographs, printed on luxuriously thick stock, capture scenes and societies that are beautiful and occasionally jarring.

The travelers encounter unforgettable characters early on, including a Turkish bus driver who resembles a “crazy Barbary pirate” and at one point stops the bus, strips down to his underwear and bathes in a nearby river. The pirate’s first mate was, Mr. Steves adds, “a half-wit with grotesque pockmarks.” The young Americans’ onboard restroom facilities—an empty cognac bottle—fit right in. 

In this new neck of the woods, Mr. Steves discovers, adapting on the fly is a high art. When he complains about a dirty sheet, a hotel staffer apologizes and turns the sheet over. Good as new! In similar spirit, the author doesn’t allow his lifelong dream of crossing the Khyber Pass to be diminished by “a little smear of yesterday’s vomit still dried” to the outside of his bus. Such are the charms of the tumbleweed life.

Mr. Steves writes with infectious awe when describing the world unfolding before him. He describes an Afghanistan idyll composed of “a herd of camels, a stray nomad or cluster of quiet tents, a mud-brick ruin melting like a sandcastle after being hit by a wave.” In Kashmir, “boys climbed like monkeys around street lamps and rooftops, cows munched newspapers in the streets, and onion-sellers handled mobs of hungry customers.” On the grim side, bodies being cremated for deposit in the Ganges River supply a memory that may never fade. As the bodies roast, “attendants kept things orderly as blackened feet, like logs on a fire, crumpled slowly into the flames.”

Mr. Steves brought along 14 rolls of film with 36 exposures a roll to cover the 55-day trip. He held himself to roughly nine pictures a day and shot wisely. Lovely children, temples and mountains are contrasted with startling images, such as those of Indian beggars in Jaipur “with missing or curly dwarfed limbs” pushing alms cups “with their mud-caked heads.” Even more disturbing is the author’s explanation that these unfortunates were “mutilated by their parents in their infancy to be more pathetic and therefore more successful in their caste-determined lives as beggars. The locals, meantime, had their own reductionist view of visitors. “Each tourist” in the Indian town of Varanasi, he writes, is seen as a “walking money tree.”

Yet that tree was shaken gently. Mr. Steves describes a tightwad’s paradise. In Herat, Afghanistan, the ritziest hotel is $5 a night (about $25 today). Dinner—meat, soup, rice, bread, cold water—sets him back an additional $1.25. The price of vice is similarly discounted. A pack of hand-rolled cigarettes in India costs 3 cents. He also utilized the universally renowned five-finger discount in Kashmir, where he “swiped a roll of quality toilet paper for the good of our world.”

Mr. Steves explains that the hippie trail “echoed the fabled Silk Road of medieval Marco Polos.” Readers familiar with Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968) may sense echoes of Ken Kesey’s 1964 psychedelic ramble across the U.S. in his vibrantly painted “Furthur” bus. Drugs feature in Mr. Steves’s journey, though the choice is marijuana and hashish instead of LSD. Before his trip, Mr. Steves had never smoked a cigarette and had spurned marijuana because it was “an object of social pressure,” but he reversed policy as the voyage progressed while also deciding not to make the pleasure a continuing passion. 

Mr. Steves updates Kesey’s famous proclamation—“You’re either on the bus or off the bus”—with an earthier observation: “Along the Hippie Trail there are two kinds of travelers: ‘those who know they have worms and those who don’t.’” Yet many of his musings sound very Haight-Ashbury, circa 1966: “Time is like bubble gum … it’s a mix of worthless and forever. You just fiddle with it.” He does some of this fiddling in Kathmandu, the Emerald City of the hippie trail, where the bliss is thick and summed up in a trio of dreamy images: “Drums and singing . . . fortissimo crickets . . . sailing clouds.”

In a postscript, Mr. Steves concludes with regret that political upheaval has made the Istanbul-to-Kathmandu journey impossible. But he urges readers to keep on wandering, even in our uncertain world. “We’re all children of God,” he insists, and by getting around a bit “we get to know the family”—and quite a family it is.

Review: Peter Wolf memoir – Waiting on the Moon 

Sometimes it’s who you know, sometimes it’s what you know, and in Peter Wolf’s case the who is every bit as impressive as the what. 

Mr. Wolf, the former lead singer of the J. Geils Band, might not be on everyone’s musical radar. But he also rubbed shoulders (and bent elbows) with a horde of A-listers, many of them remembered, usually fondly, in “Waiting on the Moon,” Mr. Wolf’s breezy, boozy and sometimes illuminating memoir. 

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Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses

By Peter Wolf

Little, Brown and Company

352 pages

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He was born Peter Blankfield in the Bronx, N.Y., in 1946. His parents were “fellow travelers” with strong political convictions and a pleasantly long leash. Mr. Wolf took up cigarettes at age 11, hung out in bars before he was legal age, and basked in the 1960s New York folk scene of Dave Van Ronk, Maria Muldaur, Tiny Tim and Bob Dylan.

Mr. Wolf was known to sneak sips from Mr. Dylan’s wine glass. He also took in performances by Louis Armstrong and was a regular at the Apollo Theater, though his initial musical expression—playing triangle in the school band—was overshadowed by his love of painting, enhanced by an acquaintance with Norman Rockwell during Mr. Wolf’s youth.

He also had a knack for bumping into interesting people. Shortly after Mr. Wolf arrived in Boston for art school in 1964, a stranger saw him perusing a bulletin board and asked, “Are you looking for a roommate?” The stranger turned out to be the future film director David Lynch, who would eventually change the lock at their shared apartment after Mr. Wolf repeatedly failed to pay the rent on time. When Mr. Wolf slipped through a window and exited with an armful of his paintings he was accosted by police who mistook him for another celebrity of sorts—the Boston Strangler. 

Mr. Wolf’s musical life blossomed in Boston, where he hosted a late-night radio show (DJ name: Woofa Goofa) and fronted a band called the Hallucinations. He chilled, and guzzled, with the prodigiously temperamental Van Morrison, and befriended the blues legends Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. In 1967 he joined the J. Geils Band, which opened for the Rolling Stones, B.B. King, Janis Joplin and Black Sabbath before becoming a headline act. 

He also caught the eye of the actress Faye Dunaway, who had starred in “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and, like Mr. Wolf, was a fan of country music. “Sugar,” she told him, “I was weaned on Lefty Frizzell, Ernest Tubb, and Kitty Wells.” They spent their first date watching “Gunsmoke” (she was a major fan of Miss Kitty) and soon he was chilling (and often swilling) with other stars, including Raquel Welch, Steve McQueen, Alfred Hitchcock, Shelley Winters, Fred Astaire, Dennis Hopper, Carrie Fisher, Robin Williams, Timothy Leary, Tennessee Williams, O.J. Simpson and Paul Newman.

14 Books We Read This week

 

Vincent Van Gogh in Paris, the secretarial school that conquered American offices, a contentious war debt and more.

At one casual dinner he initially schmoozed with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, then redirected to Ryan O’Neal and the musicians Stevie Winwood and Glenn Frey. His ever-widening musical circle included Harry Nilsson, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Sly Stone.

While Mr. Wolf drops more names than Jerry Garcia dropped acid, he also fills his pages with amusing anecdotes and pulls off some pretty good lines. The poet Robert Lowell “looked like a man in a great rush who had forgotten exactly where he was rushing to.” Lynch appeared to have come “from a world of fraternities, proms, and double dates.”

The author also describes a lifestyle that might cause the surgeon general to have a heart attack. Mr. Wolf and accomplices did not simply drink multiple glasses of wine but multiple bottles—before proceeding to cocktails. Sometimes the first drinks came just on the heels of sunrise. At Jack Nicholson’s house, a “mountain” of cocaine rose majestically from a table (after Ms. Dunaway and Mr. Nicholson disappeared for hours, Mr. Wolf dumped the whole thing into the backyard swimming pool).

Yet love, or perhaps hope, won out—at least for a while. Mr. Wolf and Ms. Dunaway were married in 1974. The matrimony lasted five years but did not end blissfully. “Don’t worry, darling,” Mr. Wolf overheard his wife say to a paramour. “I’ll be getting rid of him shortly.” In 1983 he parted ways with the J. Geils Band, though his charmed life continued. Mr. Wolf auditioned to play the infamous prefect Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), though the part eventually went to David Bowie. His musical life fared better and included collaborations with Aretha Franklin and Merle Haggard, which resulted in good tunes with memories to match.

Franklin was a woman who did as she pleased, sitting down beneath a studio “No Smoking” sign and firing up a Kool cigarette. Haggard lived by a similar spirit. One afternoon Mr. Wolf and Haggard met up with Willie Nelson and Ray Price (81 at the time) to drink whiskey (George Dickel, for those keeping score), smoke marijuana and discuss various matters of interest. Among them: Haggard’s longstanding crush on Ms. Dunaway.