Hodgdon's book brings ethnographic methods to history in a detailed study that is genuinely interdisciplinary. While the apparent focus is on masculinities of the time, and how they were (and were not) countercultural, the real strength of the discussion reflects the author's analytical skills in making his object interestingly complex: masculinity is always expressed in and through race, class, sexuality, philosophy, religion and any number of other ways in which the world can be made to “make sense”. Because the communities in question are American, the postcolonial framework is exceptionally interesting: Hodgdon records “white” appropriations from colonizing Europe and colonized Asia, as well as from romanticized black and Native American cultures, which have their own “internal” histories.

The interest here is not simply in these appropriations, which Hodgdon documents from memoirs and interviews, but in the way that they were used discursively to construct alliances, and conversely to humiliate and exclude, even in anarchist communities. Overall his thesis is that countercultural males invented themselves and their male-dominated countercultural societies, one way or another, against an “other” of crew-cut, militarized rednecks and grey-suited organization and family men of the 1950s. One of the more bizarre moments is a countercultural masculine identification with black “toughness” via Marlon Brando's leather look in The Wild One (1954). Other bizarre moments arise when sex and sexuality, spoken and performed, function as weapons in conflicts between countercultural groups themselves, and not just between them and “the pigs,” for instance.

The issues that drive the book are really wrapped up in two social and intellectual revolutions that have intertwined since the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Hodgdon's view these are, firstly, radical feminism, where the political focus shifts from public inequalities in employment and life chances to domestic and thus interpersonal power differentials between men and women, and, secondly, gay liberation, which challenged the pervasive homophobia through which sexed and raced inferiors were constructed discursively and marginalized in practice. The book thus traces a complex process through which the people of the time – including women, who play important roles in Hodgdon's analysis – negotiated their political “otherness” to conventional society using ideas and practices that seem today to be dated and unenlightened, yet in doing so they helped these larger processes along, if sometimes unwittingly. What emerges is that countercultural ideologies and concerns had little to do with the most important social movements of the next forty years in terms that can be overtly traced, yet in their way – and maybe only metaphorically – they were instrumental in remaking America.

When Hodgdon looks back at the past through memoirs and recollections there is very little to be seen of same-sex desire and relationships, and instead an all-too familiar invisibility and homophobia. The situation with respect to women and feminism is rather better, in that he finds some evidence of a developing egalitarianism between the sexes, even though the commonplace ideologies of the countercultural movement traced an American history of sexual difference and male privilege. Mostly these minor forms of equalization occurred in practical and domestic activities without much self-conscious notice, but the discussions of reproduction, birthing, motherhood and childcare are interesting – they seem to track what was going on in the “other world” of conventional society.

What gets rather less time in Hodgdon's vision is the challenge to capitalist consumerism, both urban-based and farm-based. While there is some economic detail, he does not take “free food” and suchlike all that seriously and opts rather swiftly for the sad end of some communities in “decollectivization” agreements. An examination of the prehistory of “green” and ecological ideologies might have been interesting here, and perhaps in that sense the countercultural histories recounted so thoroughly might look more up to date.