Sweet Chaos

by Carol Brightman

"If paradox is your pleasure, the Grateful Dead will never let you down. Born of the millennial yearnings of Haight Ashbury in the 1960s and founded on the principles of innovation and fierce independence, the Dead became the longest running show in American history and the centerpiece of a vast underground community whose loyalty appears undiminished."--BOOK JACKET. "How the Dead, alone among the avatars of the rebellious '60s, survived to speak to successive generations is the subject of this intensely provocative and personal narrative. Social critic and biographer Carol Brightman, who was active in the political struggles of the era, presents a Whitmanesque tableau of America's colliding countercultures."--BOOK JACKET. "Here the Dead - with their original fancy for the Beats and fondness for folk, bluegrass, and blues; their immersion in psychedelics; and their longing for a separate reality - appear alongside those they shunned: the radicals across the Bay in Berkeley. The Free Sp