The American counterculture for most people may evoke the late 1960s and some of its more flamboyant or avant-garde cultural and political expressions, but Chris Gair's penetrating account of it turns out to cover a surprisingly wide range of literature, music and film between 1945 and 1972. One of the strengths of the book is the ease with which Gair moves across the different media, and it is full of sharp insights and fascinating conjunctions of texts, and of disparate cultural moments. It will be a valuable introduction for students but will also offer real food for thought for anyone interested in the period. The book is fairly schematically organised – a section covering 1945–60, and another 1961–72, with each of these having discrete chapters on literature, art and film, but Gair does a good job of making each section closely argued, so that it avoids feeling too much like a survey, and he draws on an attractive and sometimes surprising range of examples. Thus we find discussions of album-cover art as well as Jackson Pollock, Neal Young as well as Dylan, Diane di Prima as well as Kesey and Brautigan.

Gair is clear from the beginning that he sees many of the most interesting manifestations of the counterculture as occurring not so much underground as at the intersections of popular and counterculture, and he is at pains not to see the popular as necessarily a dilution or betrayal of the “counter.” This raises the question, though, of just how Gair is defining the counterculture. He suggests that from the 1950s onwards there was more connection between popular and “oppositional cultures” than earlier, because of changes in media accessibility, among other things, but this plural form – “cultures” – is unusual, and the continued use in the book of “the” counterculture has the effect of suggesting a much more unified or homogeneous entity than the book's excellent localized analyses would encourage. It is common to acknowledge the roots of the counterculture in the beat rebellions of the 1950s, but Gair devotes half of his book to the 1950s, and to a much wider range of figures than usual, including Chester Himes and Chuck Berry, for instance, so he is clearly seeing the counterculture as already fully present. The use of Berry and of jazz reflects another welcome twist on the usual accounts, and reflects a welcome attention to the complex and changing role of African American music in the formation and expression of countercultural thinking, which goes beyond the usual lip service to the beats' use of jazz or the white Negro. Here, again, we might want to question how useful the idea of “a” counterculture is in reading the complex stance of so much African American music or literature, but these larger lingering questions in no way detract from the real achievements of this stimulating study.