Impolite Interviews

Paul Krassner endures today as an intrepid, unrehabilitated, counter-culture torch-bearer, calling attention to the absurdity in reality, poking irreverent fun at the things we hold sacred. In 1958, having decided that what the world needed was a satirical magazine for adults, Krassner began publishing The Realist, and has continued to do so, on and off, ever since. People magazine calls him the “father of the underground press.” Library Journal calls The Realist “the best satirical magazine in America.“Krassner’s Impolite Interviews delivers twenty-one of the most compelling encounters you will ever witness, from a 1959 interview with author Alan Watts to Timothy Leary in 1995 just weeks before he died, from Norman Mailer talking about sex to Jerry Garcia recounting what it was like to play the Pyramids, each interview gives a unique take on major issues: Communism, segregation, the Cold War, the sexual revolution, and the drug culture, by major personalities. Impolite Interviews presents perspectives as diverse as George Lincoln Rockwell (then head of the American Nazi Party) and spiritual master Ram Dass. Krassner offers readers an illuminating look at some of the most important figures of the second half of this century through the eyes of one of this era’s most innovative journalists.All of the interviews in Impolite Interviews were originally published in The Realist, and thirteen of the twenty-one are presented here for the first time in book form.