Promised Lands: Growing Up Absurd in the 1950s and '60s

This remarkable book offers an extraordinarily candid recollection of the odyssey of a young man from small-town, Protestant, 1950s Ontario in a quest for adventure and self-discovery in Europe and the Middle East. His search takes him through through the burgeoning counter-culture underground of the late 1960s - drugs, hippy street life, imprisonment, the June war of 1967, and psychedelics in Pamplona - and on to study in a British film school and embrace of radical politics. By turns hilarious, provocative and deeply sad, it's an irresistibly disarming portrait of blighted youth blundering through a notorious period of social upheaval. The poignancy, wit and truthfulness of the writing are spellbinding.