Uneasy rider

Biographer Tom Folsom (The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld) pitched himself into the whirlwind personal life, career and times of the late actor, filmmaker, artist, photographer and herculean substance abuser Dennis Hopper (of Easy Rider fame). Hopper: A Journey Into the American Dream ($26.99, It Books) is a disturbing, breathless tale of rebellion, passion, madness, mayhem, debauchery, paranoia, 1960s-era idealism, idiocy and brilliance. He also very accurately describes this vivid Technicolor fever dream of the Kansas farm boy who grew up wanting to fill the mythic shoes of both James Dean and Orson Welles.