"A new spirit has been moving through the social and political life of this country with the Vietnam moratorium marches, student unrest, and the spread of unorthodox mores and styles of life among the young. How is it to be understood?
"A good part of the answer the reader will find in The Human Be-In , a book that was written from the other side of the generation gap by a middle-aged, middle-class professional woman who spent eleven months in almost daily contact with the young people of the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Her book is both a narrative of personal discovery and a compelling appreciation of the hippie experience and philosophy....
"With a warmth and gentleness that matches its subject, The Human Be-In gets behind the bizarre exterior of Haight-Ashbury and brings these young people and their aims into true focus -- their ideal of love for one another, their rejection of no one, their insistence on the freedom of each person to be himself, their almost incredible generosity, their use of drugs in the search for an expansion of self-knowledge, their quest for freer sexual expression.
"Through her experience, Helen Perry gives her readers a deeper understanding of the young people of today and their sometimes bewildering behavior." [jacket blurb, US hbk, 1970]
"For almost a year, from October, 1966 until September, 1967, most of my waking hours were focused on the flower children in Haight-Ashbury. Periodically I would tear myself away from this absorption and perform other tasks that were formally required of me. But the other tasks came to be only a backdrop for an ongoing sorting of my own values and of how they were changing under the influence of the flower children, or the 'young seekers' as Allen Ginsberg has called them."In the end, I could only come to one conclusion: I, too, was a 'hippie'. I did not like the word any more than many of the young people in the Haight-Ashbury; but when asked to stand up and be counted, then I had to say that I was a hippie and had always been one, although somewhere I had lost my way so that I wore the protective coloring of a middle-aged, respectable, middle-class American. In that eleven-month period, I had undergone a transformation that affected almost every area of my life, so that it was becoming more and more difficult for me to feel comfortable in the square world." --Helen Swick Perry (from the prologue, December 1967).
"A long-time resident's compassionate view of the developing alternative scene in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in 1966-1967." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1995).
Highly recommended.
