Today, almost everyone has heard of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, California, and the Summer of Love that took place more than fifty years ago. People who were there, who were directly involved in the experience or who witnessed events firsthand will tell you it was a unique episode in American history that can never be repeated. Many young people today around the world want to know more about this revolutionary movement that played such an important role in the psychedelic sixties. We are lucky to have Louis-Bertrand Labeuhe's autobiographical account, for it gives us many insights into a youth culture that rejected the War in Vietnam, establishment values and the Protestant work ethic. Marijuana and psychedelics, Native Americans, rock music and dance concerts, communes, confrontations with local authorities, the Diggers, The San Francisco Oracle, mysticism and expanded consciousness are just a few of the things described in his thought-provoking narrative. Readers who are interested in the life and times of the Haight-Ashbury will want to check out Summer of Love Flashbacks, a candid and often humorous look at the peace and love generation as seen through the eyes of a Hashbury youth.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s hundreds of thousands of white middle-class American youths suddenly became hippies. This short overview of the hippie social movement in the United States examines the movement's beliefs and practices, including psychedelic drugs, casual sex, and rock music, as well as the phenomena of spiritual seeking, hostility to politics, and communes. W. J. Rorabaugh synthesizes how hippies strived for authenticity, expressed individualism, and yearned for community. Viewing the tumultuous Sixties from a new angle, Rorabaugh shows how the counterculture led to subsequent social and cultural changes in the United States with legacies including casual sex, natural foods, and even the personal computer.

Can drugs be used intelligently and responsibly to expand human consciousness and heighten spirituality? This two-volume work presents objective scientific information and personal stories aiming to answer the question. The first of its kind, this intriguing two-volume set objectively reports on and assesses this modern psycho-social movement in world culture: the constructive medical use of entheogens and related mind-altering substances. Covering the use of substances such as ayahuasca, cannabis, LSD, peyote, and psilocybin, the work seeks to illuminate the topic in a scholarly and scientific fashion so as to lift the typical division between those who are supporters of research and exploration of entheogens and those who are strongly opposed to any such experimentation altogether. The volumes address the history and use of mind-altering drugs in medical research and religious practice in the endeavor to expand and heighten spirituality and the sense of the divine, providing unbiased coverage of the relevant arguments and controversies regarding the subject matter. Chapters include examinations of how psychoactive agents are used to achieve altered states in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism as well as in the rituals of shamanism and other less widely known faiths. This highly readable work will appeal to everyone from high school students to seasoned professors, in both the secular world and in devoted church groups and religious colleges.

The Jive 95: An Oral History of America’s Greatest Underground Rock Radio Station, KSAN San Francisco is an oral history of America’s first hippie underground FM station which broadcast the countercultural consciousness of the ‘60s and ‘70s to a new generation. A communal radio band of intrepid hellraisers, pranksters, and drug-enlightened geniuses defined this psychedelic era, from the Summer of Love in Golden Gate Park, to the rebellion and bitter end of the late 1970s, which launched the Reagan Revolution. Founded in San Francisco by Tom Donahue, a 1996 inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, an entire generation of Americans discovered a new musical universe among dance clubs, light shows and street fests––the original pop-ups. Almost overnight, KSAN became an audio clubhouse, where anyone could belong with friends and the cool cats and hipsters they just met. Rock gods, political stars, and literary celebrities, including Jerry Garcia, Ken Kesey, Sly Stone, and John Lennon were all interviewed by founder Tom Donahue and his cohorts, whose listeners “tuned in and turned on” to bands like Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Quicksilver, Country Joe and the Fish, Hot Tuna, The Beatles and Santana, among others. Folk journalist Hank Rosenfeld was there during those final years––writing, producing, and announcing. His warm, funny voice presents a behind-the-mic experience at KSAN, the beloved, “Jive 95,” whose delicious dose of enlightened sunshine and 33 rpm LP dreamscapes ignited a radio explosion from coast to coast. So, how did KSAN go from a liberating voice to a corporate cliché? It’s all here in Rosenfeld’s insightful, hilarious account, which includes countless exclusive interviews with iconic performers and never before available in print or audio form.

The definitive biography of the 1960s music legend covers her trailblazing life from troubled childhood to iconic stardom to her tragically early death. A wild child of the Texas-Louisiana swamps, Janis Joplin wailed the blues like no one before had ever dared. She was the first rock star of the 1960s counterculture, a fashion trendsetter in San Francisco’s back-to-the-roots movement that overtook the world, and a prisoner of an ultimately doomed search for happiness in sex, drugs, money, and fame. But to those who knew and loved her intimately, she was Pearl. Acclaimed music biographer Ellis Amburn reveals the true life story of this immortal legend. From her backwater Texas childhood where classmates punished her for her individuality, Amburn charts her unlikely rise to stardom and affairs with fellow music legends including Jim Morrison, Kris Kristofferson, and Jimi Hendrix. Amburn also chronicles her losing battles with addiction, insecurity, and other forces that drove her through a short, impulsive life, to death by overdose at the age of twenty-seven.

Utopian ventures are worth close attention, to help us understand why some succeed and others fail, for they offer hope for an improved life on earth. Utopias and Utopians is a comprehensive guide to utopian communities and their founders. Some works look at literary utopias or political utopias, etc., and others examine the utopias of only one country: this work examines utopias from antiquity to the present and surveys utopian efforts around the world. Of more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries roughly half are descriptions of utopian ventures; the other half are biographies of those who were involved. Entries are followed by a list of sources and a general bibliography concludes the volume.