Robert Irwin: Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties (2011)

“For many children of the sixties a’journey to the East’was a necessary rite of passage. In an extraordinary memoir Robert Irwin contrasts the contexts of England – the new culture and the hippy trail – with those of Algeria – bombs and guns and mysticism.

In the summer of 1964, while a military coup was taking place and tanks were rolling through the streets of Algiers, Robert Irwin set off for Algeria in search of Sufi enlightenment. There he entered a world of marvels and ecstasy, converted to Islam and received an initiation as a faqir. He learnt the rituals of Islam in North Africa and he studied Arabic in London. He also pursued more esoteric topics under a holy fool possessed of telepathic powers. A series of meditations on the nature of mystical experience run through this memoir. But political violence, torture, rock music, drugs, nightmares, Oxbridge intellectuals and first love and its loss are all part of this strange story from the 1960s.”

Publisher Profile Books, April 2011
ISBN 1847654045, 9781847654045
239 pages

Reviews: Steve Jelbert (The Independent), Barnaby Rogerson (The Independent).

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Ann Swidler: Organization without Authority: Dilemmas of Social Control in Free Schools (1979)

“This is a study of alternative organizations–the free schools, communes, and collectives that grew out of the radical and political movements of the 1960s. The drama of that decade, reverberating into the 1970s and beyond, was significant for American culture and American organizational life. Yet we are still puzzled by the changes the sixties brought. This book speaks to that puzzlement, offering a systematic analysis of the characteristic organizations produced by the sixties–organizations that rejected hierarchy and authority in the attempt to devise more liberating forms of human cooperation.” (from the Preface)

Publisher Harvard University Press, 1979
ISBN 0674643402, 9780674643406
199 pages

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Thomas Frank: The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1998)

While the youth counterculture remains the most evocative and best-remembered symbol of the cultural ferment of the 1960s, the revolution that shook American business during those boom years has gone largely unremarked. In this fascinating and revealing study, Thomas Frank shows how the youthful revolutionaries were joined—and even anticipated — by such unlikely allies as the advertising industry and the men’s clothing business.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1998
ISBN 0226260127, 9780226260129
322 pages

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