West Of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California - Tapa blanda

"The counterculture--from the North Beach Parnassus to the underground press--and 'the Movement'--from Marxists to anarchists--all of it depended on a magnificent base, and here it is described, magnificently: the Oakland breakfast program, the Alcatraz occupation, the Mime troupe, and pot farms, the communes, the collectives, the co-ops of California during the 1960s. On the lam? A bad trip? Burnt out? Cracking up? AWOL? Dropping out? Requiring metamorphosis? These could provide rural and urban alternatives to Cold War, patriarchy, speed-up, or death in the jungle. With roots in previous decades of struggle by trade unions, ethnic enclaves, religious breakaways, and nineteenth century dreams, and with branches in the lore of our own contemporary foodways, child-rearing practices, decision-making and meeting protocols, sexual politics, and DIY culture, the California communards cleared the path. Both veterans and young folk, grey hairs and newbies will find beautiful memoire, authentic experience, and brilliant analysis in these pages West of Eden." --Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto

"An amazing place and time that, for all its failures, changed the world--and which finally gets its due in this marvelous collection." --Richard Walker, University of California-Berkeley, author, The Country in the City

"As a gray army of undertakers gather in Sacramento to bury California's great dreams of equality and justice, this wonderful book, with its faith in the continuity of our state's radical-communitarian ethic, replants the seedbeds of defiant imagination and hopeful resistance." --Mike Davis, author, City of Quartz

"There are a lot of versions of the sixties, and this is one that isn't stale or familiar, a book by a lot of good writers and original thinkers about how some much older ideas about the commons and the community were tinkered with, enlarged upon, turned into experiments that sometimes succeeded, sometimes failed, but left legacies that mattered. It's also a book about California's tendency to go experimental, idealistic, and eclectic, a fit successor to the classic California's Utopian Colonies that looked at some of the great nineteenth-century experiments." --Rebecca Solnit, author of Storming the Gates of Paradise

"This excellent, unique collection comes via the joint efforts of a multidisciplinary team of scholars as well as first-person accounts of activists and others. Together, they provide a large variety of perspectives from the most removed and scholarly to the most personal and passionate regarding communal experiments (including everything from the late Berkeley Co-Op store to deep experiments in communal living around Mendocino) in an area rife with experimental forms of living in the 1960s and after." --CHOICE (September 2012)