City of Love and Revolution: Vancouver in the Sixties

Literary Nonficiton. Canadian History. Aronsen tells the story of the spread of the “hippie” lifestyle north from San Francisco into Vancouver, and how this rocked the buttoned-down, Protestant, white-bread frontier town that Vancouver had been up til then. A chapter on the impact of the sexual revolution tells of love-ins, free clinics, public nudism, and the Penthouse and other Vancouver fleshpots. Other chapters recount the stories of the drugs and music that were embraced by the new generation of Vancouverites; of peaceful anti-war protesters and the birth of Greenpeace, and the harder edge of the Yippies and their occupations and street theatre; and of Vancouver Free University and the new ideas that forever changed the way Canadian schools work. Aronsen’s readable account is illustrated with over 100 photos, drawings, and advertisements drawn from the newspapers–both straight and Georgia Straight–that chronicled the era.