Trips shows, using color illustrations, the latest research, and bleeding-edge cultural analogies, how the still-mysterious hallucinogens may work in the still-mysterious brain. Written in language a general audience can understand, the book's tone is light and irreverent, yet at the same time deals with the drug culture in a serious way. Trips offers readers a rare look at the social, cultural, historical, and scientific phenomenon of psychedelics-through the eyes of artists who've grown up with them, regulators who control them, federal scientists who approve and fund their research, and scientists who've spent careers studying them—and in the process fills a growing need for truthful information about drugs. For a generation, people have been worried about false horrors attributed to LSD-chromosome damage (LSD doesn't; coffee and aspirin do), suicide, madness, and flashbacks (no such thing). There are, however, real problems associated with hallucinogens, which until now have been unknown, ignored, or untranslated from the scientific literature. Trips separates the facts from the falsehoods and provides, through the combination of Pellerin’s text and the artwork of legendary American artist Robert Crumb, a practical, entertaining, and yet rock-solid guide.

The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so he appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would help inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster's famous Paradise Gardens, his jour...

Restricted to the shorthand of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” the counterculture would seem to be a brief, vibrant stretch of the 1960s. But the American counterculture, as this book clearly demonstrates, was far more than a historical blip and its impact continues to resonate. In this comprehensive history, Damon R. Bach traces the counterculture from its antecedents in the 1950s through its emergence and massive expansion in the 1960s to its demise in the 1970s and persistent echoes in the decades since. The counterculture, as Bach tells it, evolved in discrete stages and his book describes its development from coast to heartland to coast as it evolved into a national phenomenon, involving a diverse array of participants and undergoing fundamental changes between 1965 and 1974. Hippiedom appears here in relationship to the era’s movements—civil rights, women’s and gay liberation, Red and Black Power, the New Left, and environmentalism. In its connection to other forces of the time, Bach contends that the counterculture’s central objective was to create a new, superior society based on alternative values and institutions. Drawing for the first time on documents produced by self-described “freaks” from 1964 through 1973—underground newspapers, memoirs, personal correspondence, flyers, and pamphlets—his book creates an unusually nuanced, colorful, and complete picture of a time often portrayed in clichéd or nostalgic terms. This is the counterculture of love-ins and flower children, of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, but also of antiwar demonstrations, communes, co-ops, head shops, cultural feminism, Earth Day, and antinuclear activism. What Damon R. Bach conjures is the counterculture in all of its permutations and ramifications as he illuminates its complexity, continually evolving values, and constantly changing components and adherents, which defined and redefined it throughout its near decade-long existence. In the long run, Bach convincingly argues that the counterculture spearheaded cultural transformation, leaving a changed America in its wake.

One of Hollywood's biggest personalities, Bruce Dern is not afraid to say what he thinks. He has left an indelible mark on numerous projects, from critically acclaimed films to made-for-TV movies and television series. His notable credits include The Great Gatsby (1974), The 'Burbs (1989), Monster (2003), Django Unchained (2012), and Nebraska (2013), for which he won the Best Actor award at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. He also earned Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor in Coming Home (1978) and for Best Actor in Nebraska (2013). In Bruce Dern: A Memoir, Christopher Fryer and Robert Crane help the outspoken star frame the fascinating tale of his life in Hollywood. Dern details the challenges he faced as an artist in a cutthroat business, his struggle against typecasting, and his thoughts on and relationships with other big names in the industry, including Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Bob Dylan, Matt Damon, Jane Fonda, John Wayne, and Tom Hanks. He also explores the impact of his fame on his family and discusses his unique relationship with his daughter, actress Laura Dern. Edgy and uncensored, this memoir takes readers on a wild ride, offering an insider's view of the last fifty years in Hollywood.

An inexperienced teenager leaves his suburban California home to visit his brother in San Francisco, and dives into the Hippie Movement of the sixties.Establishing himself in the Flower Power scene of the Haight Ashbury District, he becomes a bell-bottomed entrepreneur, running a unique used garment business from the back of an old, brightly painted step van, becoming known only as Jester.Heavily involved in the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle, he meets fascinating characters like Janis Joplin and Timothy Leary and has many amazing experiences, until he burns out on the whole scene. Leaving the bay area, He searches for a different direction.Jester moves in and out of different lifestyles, becoming a road nomad, traveling, over the years, from the mountains of Big Sur all the way to Alaska, with many stops along the way. In Jester: Memoirs of a Retired hippie, Jester tastes love and loss, joy and deep sorrow, and the magic that still exists in the world, evolving into a unique and wise older man.

Rx Hollywood investigates how therapy surfaced in the themes, representations, and narrative strategies of a changing film industry. In the 1960s and early 1970s, American cinema was struggling to address adult audiences who were increasingly demanding films that confronted contemporary issues. Focusing upon five fields of therapeutic inquiry—therapist/patient dynamics, female "frigidity" and male impotence, marital discord, hallucinogenic drug use, and the dynamics of confession—Michael DeAngelis argues that the films of this period reveal an emergent, common tendency of therapy to work toward the formation of a stronger sense of interpersonal, community/social, and political engagement, counteracting alienation and social division in the spirit of connection and community. Prior to the 1960s, therapy had been considered an introspective process, one that emphasized contemplation and insight and prompted the patient to investigate memories and past traumas. In the 1960s, however, therapy would move toward more humanistic, client-centered, community, group, and encounter models that deemphasized the "there and then" of past feelings and experiences and embraced the "here and now" of the present. These kinds of therapy promised to heal the self through a process of reaching out, helping individuals to connect with communities, support networks, and other like-minded individuals who shared a needed sense of belonging. Drawing on a wide range of films, including Marnie, The Boston Strangler, The Chapman Report, Carnal Knowledge, Divorce American Style, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Five Easy Pieces, DeAngelis shows how American culture framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, developing treatment strategies that addressed individual psychological problems as social problems.