Here are 60 books that The 60s fans have personally recommended if you like
The 60s.
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I have a weird imagination and care deeply about being kind in all areas of life. I think people, in general, need to be kinder to one another and to the earth. I find humanity to be too anthropocentric and dismissive of the intelligence of other creatures. The incredible complexity and interconnectedness of nature fascinate me, and I constantly look for connections between two seemingly disparate systems. Writing my book allowed me to put insects at the focal point of planetary control. It was an incredibly fun story to write.
I love how Huxley depicts a utopic community in a sea of unrestrained capitalism. This book got me thinking about solutions to problems I didn’t know existed. It got me to rethink how I view family structures, community, responsible drug use, and meditation. I appreciate how he centered the conflict around his ideal world versus the world imposed on his ideals by reality.
For over a hundred years the Pacific island of Pala has been the scene of a unique experiment in civilisation. Its inhabitants live in a society where western science has been brought together with Eastern philosophy to create a paradise on earth. When cynical journalist, Will Farnaby, arrives to research potential oil reserves on Pala, he quickly falls in love with the way of life on the island. Soon the need to complete his mission becomes an intolerable burden and he must make a difficult choice.
In counterpoint to Brave New World and Ape and Essence, in Island Huxley gives…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I became a young man near the end of the sixties, and I have always been enthralled by the era's various idiosyncrasies, both good and bad. For instance, I loved the complex yet pleasant rock music and the freewheeling lifestyle. On the downside, the war in Vietnam cast its pall over the times, and I narrowly escaped being drafted and sent off to Southeast Asia. Overall, it was an era in which good and evil were starkly defined, and many people were attempting to create a better, more peaceful world. There is still much we can learn from this time.
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.
The original uncut edition of STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Hugo Award winner Robert A Heinlein - one of the most beloved, celebrated science-fiction novels of all time. Epic, ambitious and entertaining, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND caused controversy and uproar when it was first published and is still topical and challenging today.
Twenty-five years ago, the first manned mission to Mars was lost, and all hands presumed dead. But someone survived...
Born on the doomed spaceship and raised by the Martians who saved his life, Valentine Michael Smith has never seen a human being until the day a…
I was a teenager in the up-tight, homophobic, misogynist 50s that today’s right wing-nuts would like to inflict on us again. Born in 1941, I was a few years older than friends and relatives who homesteaded where land was cheap and neighbours tolerant, I shared their abhorrence of the Vietnam War. I admired them for daring to reject “the system,” but I was also troubled by their lack of foresight, which so often led to calamity. A lifetime later, some survivors of those hopeful times remain where they homesteaded; and many of those who left are still pursuing love, peace, and happiness.
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.
We are as gods and we might as well get used to it. So far remotely done power and glory - as via government, big business, formal education, church - has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing - the power of individuals to conduct their own education, find their own inspiration, shape their own environment, and share the adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by The Next Earth Catalog.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I was a teenager in the up-tight, homophobic, misogynist 50s that today’s right wing-nuts would like to inflict on us again. Born in 1941, I was a few years older than friends and relatives who homesteaded where land was cheap and neighbours tolerant, I shared their abhorrence of the Vietnam War. I admired them for daring to reject “the system,” but I was also troubled by their lack of foresight, which so often led to calamity. A lifetime later, some survivors of those hopeful times remain where they homesteaded; and many of those who left are still pursuing love, peace, and happiness.
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.”
I’m a literary historian and I love reconstructing times in the past with enough factual detail that a reader feels as if they are there with the characters, side-by-side. I didn’t start this way. In fact, I wrote fiction for over a decade. It was only after writing eight atrocious, tension-less, now-in-a-box novels that I realized the books I enjoyed reading most were in the history and biography sections of a bookstore. Still, I was undeniably affected by my years in the trenches of fiction writing. As you may see from my choices, I love reading material from writers attempting to check the pulse of the country at that time.
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.
I've loved horror since I was a kid. However, the horror of the unexpected has frequently popped up in my life. This started most prominently with a day on the beach, near the haunted Hotel del Coronado; while my mind was busy thinking of ghosts, I busily picked up various seashells, only to be shocked to find a crab in one of the shells I had attempted to retrieve. Several paranormal experiences and many late nights of research later, I have become the writer presenting you this list today. I've spent a lot of time watching movies, teaching, and reading about sociology. Happy reading!
It's another sci-fi book! Luckily, it has a fun, psychedelic-flower-child color palette, so it should be fine.
Probably the biggest stretch on this list, this is mostly horror by implication. There are a lot of real-life event references, several characters are hippies (including the main character), and there's even a thread of romance. On the flip side, there's also some other stuff from the era of the "Summer of Love", like clandestine organizations and war protests that poignantly reminded me of the oxymoron, "fighting for peace".
In 1969 a timid teen sets out on a road trip. His goal? Find out the origins of his bizarre super human abilities. Always the follower, his trip is derailed when he befriends a group of extremist war protesters
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
From my term paper in 11th grade on Life After Death, I’ve always been fascinated with what happens when we pass away, reincarnation, and all things unexplained. After I lost a few important people in my life, I was more compelled than ever to find answers. A trip to a medium, who mentioned the challenges we’re meant to learn and the fact that we reincarnate with the same “soul family,” sent me off to the races reading every book I could find on the topic. What I uncovered left me wanting to tell a story of my own that would leave people wondering if there’s more than we realize—before, during, and after this life.
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?”
In his groundbreaking first book, Your Soul's Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born, Robert Schwartz brought the idea of pre-birth planning into the mainstream. Now, his compelling sequel delves even deeper. With detailed discussion and the deeply personal stories of his interviewees, Schwartz offers an incredible guide map to the soul and encourages his readers to heal at a profound level. Through complex ideas such as the development of greater self-love, an emergence from victim consciousness, and understanding the qualities you came into this lifetime to cultivate and express, Schwartz bestows practical…
As an author of historical fiction, I have a number of time periods that I go back to again and again. Both the 1960s (specifically, the late 1960s) and the 1990s are two of those eras that I just can’t get enough of. The parallels between these two time periods are very compelling: both were times of political upheaval and amazing music, with young people leading the charge, hoping to create a better world than the one they were disenchanted with.
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.
It's 1967 and fifteen-year-old Joanne's San Francisco neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury has become inundated with hippies for the "Summer of Love," which thrills her but appalls the rest of her family. In the midst of preparations for her sister's wedding, Joanne meets Martin, an enigmatic and irresistible hippie, and begins to see him secretly. Over the course of the next year, Joanne discovers a world of drugs, antiwar demonstrations, and psychedelic dances that both fascinates and frightens her. As this world collides with her family's values, Joanne must decide whether to stay with her middle-class family and pursue her love of…
In school, I was a math and science nerd but also loved to write. I got good grades, except in history; memorizing dates and events was boring. My dad loved history. When he told stories about historical figures, I was fascinated. In twelfth grade, my history teacher told stories like my dad, and I started acing the class. Since then, I’ve become obsessed with history and devour good historical books, particularly when they focus on the people who change history. And now, I’ve actually been in places at times when history was made.
This book is a true, firsthand account of Dianne Lake, a teenage member of the Manson family cult that horrifically murdered people in the 1960s while attempting to start a race war.
I found the book hard to put down for its insights into the mind of a young girl abandoned by her parents who found acceptance by a charming yet psychotic man and his band of adoring, troubled sycophants. This book also put the turbulent 60s into perspective.
Growing up in the sixties, I was disturbed and frightened by the discord in society, perhaps not unlike society today. People have romanticized the hippie movement since then, but Dianne’s story put this troubled time into perspective, showing the drug use and casual sex that went hand in hand with the abandonment of personal responsibility to society, friends, and even family.
In this poignant and disturbing memoir of lost innocence, coercion, survival, and healing, Dianne Lake chronicles her years with Charles Manson, revealing for the first time how she became the youngest member of his Family and offering new insights into one of the twentieth century’s most notorious criminals and life as one of his "girls."
At age fourteen Dianne Lake―with little more than a note in her pocket from her hippie parents granting her permission to leave them―became one of "Charlie’s girls," a devoted acolyte of cult leader Charles Manson. Over the course of two years, the impressionable teenager endured…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Almost all of my books have been historical novels, but this one is the one most dear to me, an attempt to understand the fault line that the Vietnam War laid across American society, leaving almost every man of my generation with scars physical or psychic. My picks are all books that illuminate the multiple upheavals of that time.
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.
In his energetic, funny, and intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the counterculture—a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self-imposed poverty of the West Coast communal movement known as The Diggers. With this innovative collective of artist-anarchists who had assumed as their task nothing less than the re-creation of the nation’s political and social soul, Coyote and his companions soon became power players.
In prose both graphic and unsentimental, Coyote reveals the…
