We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against

Books about the sixties have proliferated in recent years, but none has surpassed Nicholas von Hoffman’s classic account of the 1960s counter-culture in San Francisco. “In the summer of 1967,” he writes, “youth drew attention to itself by clustering in large numbers in most major American cities, where they broke the narcotics laws proudly, publicly, and defiantly. At the same time, they enunciated a different social philosophy and a new politics, and perhaps even mothered into life a subculture that was new to America. This book tries to explain what happened in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. For it was in the Haight that whatever happened, happened most vividly and so intensely that it drew international attention to itself.” “An impressively serious treatment.”—New York Times. “A rare example of journalism that approaches art in one direction and the best of social science in another.”—Newsweek.