Lawrence Aronsen was a student activist in Vancouver during the 1960s. He’s now a professor of history at the University of Alberta. This combination makes him a logical person to write about the West Coast culture of the 1960s and ’70s that is now totally and abjectly historical, such as events now merely alluded to in the annual Hippie Daze festival sponsored by small-business owners in Kitsilano, the former headquarters of the counterculture that is now as expensive as it is trendy.

All the familiar characters are here. On one hand there’s Dan McLeod, founder of the alt-weekly The Georgia Straight. On the other there’s McLeod’s nemesis, Mayor Tom Campbell, a right-wing property developer who tried to build an expressway through Chinatown and used the police to forcibly remove a “cancerous growth that is invading society” – i.e., hippies. And it is good to be reminded of the late Kim Foikis, a street-theatre performer who wore a jester’s costume and called himself the “town fool,” which actually became an official position funded by city council. More importantly, Aronsen brings to bear, contextually and thoughtfully, an enormous amount of small but telling detail about civic politics, drugs, civil disobedience, alternative education, and numerous other topics. The book is generously illustrated with maps, posters, and the like, as well as many wonderful and obscure archival photos.

However, to my mind at least, he places far too much emphasis on the cultural, social, and intellectual links between San Francisco (as the provider of energy) and Vancouver (as the consumer). His prose is serious and readable, though marred sometimes by unsuccessful attempts at journalistic cleverness. For example, he refers to hangouts on West Fourth Avenue as “dens of hallucinogenic iniquity” and calls the Vietnam War “that misguided Asian interlude.” Such diction is the property of sportswriters who, on the second reference to the football, call it “the pigskin,” and on the third, “the leather spheroid.”