The last great dream How bohemians became hippies and created the sixties

Grateful Dead biographer McNally (A Long Strange Trip) offers a far-reaching, immersive history of the post-WWII countercultural movement. Beginning in the late 1940s, McNally traces how a "whirlpool of maverick poets" in San Francisco overlapped with art, theater, music, and activist scenes in Los Angeles, New York, and London. He hits on the era's big names--Beats like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, bands such as the Beatles and Jefferson Airplane--but gives equal attention to lesser-known artists who eschewed commercial success, among them Jay DeFeo, whose 1,850-lb. painting The Rose took a forklift to move, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe with its "politicized commedia dell'arte." McNally tracks how police and local governments made a concerted effort to push back against the anti-establishment bohemians through frequent crackdowns on free speech, from high-profile censorship cases against Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Lenny Bruce's comedy to less infamous incidents like the targeting of a gallerist who showed Ron Boise's sculptures of "sexual positions from the Karma Sutra." McNally concludes with several landmark moments in 1967 that made the "insights" of this "small group of avant-garde artists" suddenly "accessible"--among them the Human Be-In in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury--which hastened not only the mainstreaming but also the watering down of bohemianism into hippiedom. McNally masterfully combines many disparate lineages of political, social, art, and pop history into one singular, sweeping portrait. The result is a stunning vision of a broad and powerful idealism that gripped the world for more than two decades. (May)

Grateful Dead biographer McNally examines the origins of the hippie counterculture in the post--World War II era. The epicenter of American bohemia has always been San Francisco, where in the late 1940s "a thread of artistic discourse focused on freedom coalesced into a subculture." Though he disavowed the beatnik label that would come in the next decade, the center of this subculture was the poet Kenneth Rexroth, who, McNally holds, practiced an anarchism "in which the personalis political," certainly a belief that would take root and then later flourish in the hippie and anti-war movements. (As McNally correctly notes, "hippie" is a media coinage: The hippies proudly called themselves "freaks.") McNally takes his discussion to Los Angeles, never quite hip but "fertile ground for nonmainstream religious and occult thinking"; he extends it further to Greenwich Village, where a tougher-edged bohemian movement was rising. Well versed in the history of the era while not exactly breaking new ground, McNally locates some of the climacterics of the counterculture in works such as the abstract paintings of Clyfford Still, the satirical writings of Paul Krassner, and particularly Allen Ginsberg's poemHowl, which "simultaneously foreshadowed and helped to propagate the values of the youth culture of the 1960s." He might have done more to make that connection more explicit, but McNally ventures a number of useful observations, including the heavy-handedness of the police as a kind of spur for rebellion and the continuing influence of the 1960s in the first years of the computer revolution, suggesting that its birth in the San Francisco Bay Area was for good reason: "The atmosphere of the Haight and LSD imparted a vision of computers that served individuals." He sounds a hopeful chord in the thought that while the dream of the '60s may be dead, "the dreaming continues." An ambitious, highly capable work of cultural history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.