Customer Reviews

Memories of Drop City: The first hippie commune of the 1960's and the Summer of Love

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I dug it.

As I go looking for the future of the hippies, I reach back to see where it started. He was there a 100% and it shows. Drop city was pivotal in the back to the earth movements now and than. It's was important then when people were looking for a better way. More important now as we learn from the mistakes of those that came before. Very few people that were in the hurricanes eye of that cultural revolution told there stories and of those that did, few did it as well as Ishmael (as used to be called). Not only did he survive the countless insane revolutions, he kept positive and activated, where so many of his comrades became jaded and disillusioned. Then he took the time to share. What a gift, a mirror, a lesson.
If you're at all interested in those pioneers of the heart and mind that came before, you'll dig it too and be inspired by the whackiness of those days. It'll make you sad you weren't there at the genesis of many positive things, but glad to see so many tried so hard and in fact made the world a better place.

I bought this book for a school paper about self-reliant communities and expected to find details about how Drop City operated, day-to-day information. How did members support themselves financially? If they worked, where? Where did they get their food from? What did they eat (there was very little info on this)? What were their criteria for choosing this land (again, superficially touched on)? If they had planned to be self-reliant, then why did they purchase land on saline ground? What about the potable water situation? Where did the waste go? Did they use a septic system? What about doing laundry? Where they completely supplied with solar energy? Feeding the babies? So many questions, and more, that Curl provided no answer to.

If you want to read anecdotes about people getting drugged, hook up for promiscuous sex, then get into jealous games with their partners, and overall fight a lot, then you may find this book entertaining.
But if you are looking for apparently impossible to find information on the details of this place, or an actual autobiography of John Curl, then you won't find it here.

Some parts made me laugh out loud, but much of this book made me wonder about the level of intelligence of many members, judging by their language, thoughts, and behaviour.
At the end, Curl makes a haphazard attempt of analyzing what went wrong at Crop City. I only wish he had done more. For me, this was a wasted opportunity to compose a historical account of a community so eccentric and yet so ordinary.