The most recommended hippie books

Who picked these books? Meet our 65 experts.

65 authors created a book list connected to hippies, and here are their favorite hippie books.
When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

What type of hippie book?

Loading...
Loading...

Book cover of Flowers Through Concrete

Joachim C. Häberlen Author Of Beauty is in the Street

From my list on protesting in post-war Europe hope and inspiration.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, I’ve worked on different forms of protesting and street politics in twentieth-century Europe, always with an eye to how these histories might speak to the present. Having taught at the British University of Warwick, I’m now teaching high school students in Berlin, a career change that raised a simple but fundamental question once again: Why should we bother with history? What can we learn from history today? My passion for histories of protesting provides the answer to this question: These are histories that inspire dreaming, struggling, experimenting—and continuing to do so despite failures.

Joachim's book list on protesting in post-war Europe hope and inspiration

Joachim C. Häberlen Why did Joachim love this book?

I hardly imagined the Soviet Union, a place of grey and black, with the only sparks of color being red, to be a place for hippie culture to flourish. Juliane Fürst’s book taught me otherwise. It leads into a world of people like Azazello and Ofelia, who look like “angels, creatures from another world, blots of color on a grey canvas, flowers in a concrete desert.”

The book traces how these hippies, against all odds, found ways to distance themselves from the Soviet System, not through open opposition but through dreaming of and living a different life, communally, spiritually, and often on the road. And Fürst’s book does more than merely portray Soviet hippies in a fundamentally sympathetic way: It also reveals what we can learn about a larger society by studying those at the margins. It is an unusual but highly illuminating perspective on the late Soviet Union.

By Juliane FĂźrst,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Flowers Through Concrete as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland takes the reader on a journey into the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies. In the face of disapproval and repression, they created a version of Western counterculture, skillfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. Flowers through Concrete takes its readers into the underground hippieland and beyond, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering both an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study of transnational youth culture and East-West globalization.

Flowers through Concrete is based on over a hundred…


Book cover of Flowers Through Concrete

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,724

readers submitted
so far, will you?