Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America, by Larry Sloman

Doubleday, 437 pages, $27.50

If you're going to sit down and pen the life story of Abbott (Abbie) Hoffman, the foremost American radical-revolutionary of this half century, you might as well toss the conventional approach out the window. After all, Abbie Hoffman's life was about taking anything but the conventional approach: whether he was questioning racial inequities in his hometown of Worcester or stirring up trouble at the Democratic National Convention, he was constantly bucking the establishment and the tried-and-true methods for effecting change. So the last thing anyone wants to read is a staid, birth-to-death biography of Hoffman that comes across like that of, say, a president or an army general.

Thankfully, Larry Sloman recognizes this fact. Sloman, a sometime Howard Stern collaborator and a former editor at National Lampoon and High Times, interviewed more than 200 people in compiling this lengthy oral history: the result traces the major events of Hoffman's life, from his Worcester days and his schooling at Brandeis to his activism in the South and the Lower East Side of Manhattan to his national coming-out party at the 1968 convention, his personal struggles with depression, and, finally, his suicide in 1989.

Sloman's book is an ambitious project, to be sure, but what emerges is an energetic, compelling, and impressively candid portrait of an American icon and a countercultural hero.

The oral-history format allows Sloman to present, with minimal editing, the perspectives of a remarkable group of relatives, colleagues, and enemies of Hoffman -- a list that includes the likes of Howard Zinn, William Kunstler, Allen Ginsberg, Grace Slick, Wavy Gravy, Kinky Friedman, and G. Gordon Liddy. Not surprisingly, the recollections of these interviewees often clash, deftly underscoring the often-contradictory spirit of Hoffman's life. Hoffman, after all, was a creature of the underground who became a household name, a family man who was a relentless womanizer, and a hilarious public jester whose private life was darkened by manic-depression.

When Hoffman was found dead in 1989 -- "curled up in the fetal position on the bed in his converted turkey coop in rural Pennsylvania, after ingesting a massive dose of barbiturates and Scotch," Sloman writes in the book's introduction -- pundits suggested that he was frustrated at his inability to change America. But Steal This Dream proves he already had. Recalling hearing the news of his father's death, Hoffman's son America says: "Tom Brokaw said the coolest thing, it hit me so hard it made me cry. He said, `Abbie Hoffman is gone. We've ridiculed him for so long but now he's gone. Let's have a minute of peace for Abbie Hoffman.' "

-- Jason Gay