55 books like The 60s

I admit that Huxley’s final novel is a rather difficult one to read. It’s long, it goes on too long in some places, it’s kind of fiction and philosophy together, and it includes a book within a book. However, The Island is a work of genius.

There’s the utopian island of Pala (not dystopian), and all through the book, there’s the threat of the invading Rendang kingdom. It includes some Buddhist ideas with the birds on the island that say karuna (meaning compassion) and "attention" to remind islanders of the now, yet ultimately, in the end, the island is invaded, and the utopia becomes exposed as a fake.

Although this book is ostensibly set in the future, countercultural enthusiasts of the sixties were quick to claim it for their own, with its references to transcendental enlightenment, out-of-body experiences, communal living, and free sex.

It became a best-selling phenomenon as contemporary young people reacted positively to its iconoclastic attitudes. That's what happened to me, too, when I came across the book shortly before the move to the Bay Area that opened my eyes to the reality of the psychedelic sixties.

TWEC is a hippie homesteading encyclopedia: 450 tabloid-size pages of “mind-blowing,” semi-practical idealism. The back cover photo is of the earth from space. The caption reads, “We can’t put it together. It is together.”

The first pages of the 620,000 copies published in 1971 featured Buckminster Fuller on systems, Arthur Koestler on consciousness, Teilhard de Chardin on spirituality, and Paul Ehrlich on The Population Bomb.

TWEC primarily offered mail-order sources for books and tools about agriculture, farming, edible plants, gardening, raising goats, chickens, pigs, building solar-heated buildings, well-drilling, gold mining, and much more, including a continuing story of how Divine Right crossed the USA Urge, his ’63 VW Microbus.

Like youth culture in the 60s, The Last Whole Earth Catalog was varied, challenging, seditious, profound, silly, exciting, practical, confusing, and confused. I loved it.

Walt Kelly’s tales of Pogo Possum and Albert the Alligator in the Okefenokee Swamp began in 1948. Like many daily cartoon strips it featured anthropomorphic characters. The humour was sweet, gentle, and “ridickelwockle,” letting Pogo fly under the radar of censorship until they noticed that Kelly was lampooning politicians. “Family” newspapers banned the strip, but Kelly had captured his readers’ hearts.

Walt Kelley expressed the essence of the anti-Vietnam War protest when he had Pogo say, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.”

Perhaps you’re already aware of all of these books. Well, allow me to introduce Nebraska-born author Wright Morris—a perpetually ignored force of nature. Morris mainly wrote award-winning fiction, but this collection of essays was a refreshing and straightforward way of looking at, to take one offbeat example, hippies: “Hippies share some knowledge of where they have been, but no demonstrable insight into where they are going…What they share is a condition, not a direction.” Morris even temporarily torpedoes his own genre to make his point. “Who needs fiction? What could be stranger than the news on the hour?” In 1968 America, the ‘truth’ was indeed stranger than fiction.

A sweet story of a young woman named Joanne, coming of age in California during the height of the Flower Power movement, who meets and falls in love with a “hippie”, much to the chagrin of her parents.

Martin introduces her to a world of drugs, protests, and music, and her life will never be the same. 

From my eleventh-grade term paper about life after death, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of reincarnation.

This extremely insightful book only fueled that interest. It explores the idea that our souls pre-plan the challenges in each lifetime with purpose.

This book made me look at the struggles I’ve experienced much differently. Now the question I always ask myself is, “What was I supposed to learn from that?”

Gayle Brandeis’s intimate memoir of wrestling with her mother’s suicide following a long mental illness kept me company in the ways it mirrored my own experience. It is sometimes easier to mourn a stranger’s pain, as you edge towards your own grief. Brandeis’s reading through her mother’s letters, with their paranoid delusions and grandiose aspirations, “passionate and creatively punctuated,” rang true to my father’s crazy literary outpourings. Her experiences of entering her mother’s home to witness the evidence of her last activities, to the almost physical trauma of learning the stark details of her mother’s suicide method, comforted me in their familiarity. The suicide of a mentally ill parent leaves a lot of guilt and confusion in its wake. Anger and resentment aren’t what one “should” feel after a death of a parent, but Brandeis doesn’t sugarcoat the complex mess of emotions that needs to be untangled. 

I found this book extremely important because it finally put to bed the myth that counter-cultural women were merely subservient to their male counterparts, while these women did so much to actually shape the counter-culture.

I recommend reading this alongside Nina Graboi’s criminally neglected autobiography–One Foot in the Future–that serves as a perfect illustration of American women successfully looking for empowerment in these counter-cultural enclaves.

This is a classic account of the rebellious souls of the counterculture who attempted to disentangle themselves from a society they found stifling and parasitic.

Coyote’s memoir is sometimes bleak, sometimes funny, almost always endearing even through the worst of unintended consequences.

A brutally and beautifully written picture of a time that sought to remake America for the better.