A pictorial look back at a special time in a special place, a social history of the 1970s counterculture on the Mendocino Coast of northern California, with 160 pages and over 180 documentary photos. The limited first edition was sold out a week after release, becoming an instant rare book. The current First Revised Edition is the same book with a few errors and omissions corrected. "...Nicholas Wilson brings that era to blazing life once more. It's time travel at its funniest and most poignant.... Reading 'Mendocino In the Seventies' is a bittersweet visit to a time we imagined could last forever, but was gone in the space of a decade or so. ... If you can find a copy ... by all means grab it." -- Tony Miksak in Words On BooksRead the full review by longtime bookseller Tony Miksak in the archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20080514075418/http://www.gallerybookshop.com/bkm/wob061217.htmlFor complete details and sample photos see www.nwilsonphoto.com/book.htm

Exploring the roots of resurgent evangelicalism in the United States, Stephen Warner tells the story of one small-town church from 1959 to 1982, the Presbyterian Church of Mendocino, California. This book chronicles the actions of the men and women who struggled with and against one another to shape their church.

In the shadow of the Vietnam War, a significant part of an entire generation refused their assigned roles in the American century. Some took their revolutionary politics to the streets, others decided simply to turn away, seeking to build another world together, outside the state and the market. West of Eden charts the remarkable flowering of communalism in the 1960s and ’70s, fueled by a radical rejection of the Cold War corporate deal, utopian visions of a peaceful green planet, the new technologies of sound and light, and the ancient arts of ecstatic release. The book focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area and its hinterlands, which have long been creative spaces for social experiment. Haight-Ashbury’s gift economy—its free clinic, concerts, and street theatre—and Berkeley’s liberated zones—Sproul Plaza, Telegraph Avenue, and People’s Park—were embedded in a wider network of producer and consumer co-ops, food conspiracies, and collective schemes. Using memoir and flashbacks, oral history and archival sources, West of Eden explores the deep historical roots and the enduring, though often disavowed, legacies of the extraordinary pulse of radical energies that generated forms of collective life beyond the nuclear family and the world of private consumption, including the contradictions evident in such figures as the guru/predator or the hippie/entrepreneur. There are vivid portraits of life on the rural communes of Mendocino and Sonoma, and essays on the Black Panther communal households in Oakland, the latter-day Diggers of San Francisco, the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, the pioneers of live/work space for artists, and the Bucky dome as the iconic architectural form of the sixties. Due to the prevailing amnesia—partly imposed by official narratives, partly self-imposed in the aftermath of defeat—West of Eden is not only a necessary act of reclamation, helping to record the unwritten stories of the motley generation of communards and antinomians now passing, but is also intended as an offering to the coming generation who will find here, in the rubble of the twentieth century, a past they can use—indeed one they will need—in the passage from the privations of commodity capitalism to an ample life in common.

In this definitive collection of essays spanning fifteen years, R. Stephen Warner traces the development of the "new paradigm" interpretation of American religion. Originally formulated in the 1990s in response to prevailing theories of secularization that focused on the waning plausibility of religion in modern societies, the new paradigm reoriented the study of religion to a focus on communities, subcultures, new religious institutions, and the fluidity of modern religious identities. This perspective continues to be one of the most important driving forces in the field and one of the most significant challenges to the idea that religious pluralism inevitably leads to religious decline. A leading sociologist of religion, Warner shows how the new paradigm stresses the role that religion plays as a vehicle for the bonding and expression of communities within the United States--a society founded on the principle of religious disestablishment and characterized by a diverse and mobile population. Chapters examine evangelicals and Pentecostals, gay and lesbian churches, immigrant religious institutions, Hispanic parishes, and churches for the deaf in terms of this framework. Newly written introductory and concluding essays set these groups within the broad context of the developing field. A thoughtfully organized and timely collection, the volume is a valuable classroom resource as well as essential reading for scholars of contemporary religion.

In the vein of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief and Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox, journalist Emily Brady journeys into a secretive subculture — built on marijuana. Outside the United States, the words ‘Humboldt County’ mean little. Inside the United States — the home of the war on drugs — those words might prompt a knowing grin. For many people, the name is infamous, and yet the place and its inhabitants have been nearly impenetrable. Until now. Humboldt is a narrative exploration of this insular community in northern California, which for nearly 40 years has existed primarily on the cultivation and sale of marijuana. It’s a place where business is done with thick wads of cash, and savings are buried in the backyard. In Humboldt County, marijuana supports everything from fire departments to schools. As legalisation looms, the community stands at a crossroads, and its inhabitants are deeply divided — some want to claim their rightful heritage as master growers and have their livelihood legitimised, while others want to continue reaping the inflated profits of the black market. Emily Brady spent a year living with the highly secretive residents of Humboldt County, and her cast of eccentric, intimately drawn characters take us into a fascinating alternate universe. It’s the story of a small town that became dependent on a forbidden plant, and of how everything is changing as marijuana goes mainstream.

A collection of color photographs taken over a period of decades, Feb. 1968 - July 1998, with descriptions by Roger Steffens and afterwords by Kate and Devon Steffens.