Hippie Book

Between the years 1965 and 1971 something happened to make the world on one side of that divide all but unrecognizable to the world on the other side. For better or for worse (it very much depends on whom you ask), those seven years revolutionized western-and eventually global-culture as utterly as any of the great turning points in our history. What happened were the hippies.

Long hair, grass and LSD, free love, rock music and the great festivals from Monterey to Woodstock, antiwar protests and political activism, communes and macrobiotics, spiritual seeking in Eastern religions and personal transformation in therapies and practices from est to gestalt, the first stirrings of the modern environmental and feminist movements: the hippies were defined by virtually everything so-called straight society was not.

Hippie combines hundreds of photographs, a fascinating narrative highlighting all the social and cultural upheavals of the time, as well as quotations from many of the people-Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Grace Slick, George Harrison, Wavy Gravy, and many others-who lived through and shaped the counter culture. Proceeding year by year, it gives an unprecedented degree of shape and coherence to a time that by its nature is kaleidoscopically bewildering.

For instance, 1965 saw the formation of the key psychedelic rock bands, including the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. In 1966 the Hare Krishna movement was born, and 1967 was the year of the Summer of Love in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury and the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In 1968 politics erupted into violent clashes from Paris to Chicago. 1969 demonstrated the possibilities of the communal spirit at Woodstock as well as its limits at Altamont. 1970 was marked by the first Gay Pride marches and the first Earth Day in the U.S. And by 1971, even politicians were wearing their hair down to their collars and many aspects of the hippie way of life, from vegetarianism and organic food to the perpetual quest for enlightenment and self-realization, had taken permanent root in the general community -- and marketplace.

This book is a sensory delight and a mind expanding trip for those who came of age before and after the hippie years and wonder what that time was really like, and especially for those who were part of the scene themselves and would like to know how their particular experience fits in with everything that the hippies meant and presaged.

About the author:

Barry Miles was a central figure in the development of the hippie movement in the UK and has written biographies of Beat generation writers Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.