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The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. By Timothy Miller. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. xxviii, 329 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8156-2811-0. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 08156-0601-X.)
Timothy Miller's valuable though fact-swollen volume of the history of communes in the 1960s tells us both too much and too little about the greatest surge in communalism in American history. Miller, a professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas, takes the reader on a winding, cross-country tour, during which he visits as many of the tens of thousands of communes that arose during the sixties and introduces as many of the hundreds of thousands of communards who lived in them as possible-all in a book of rather modest size.
Miller divides the communal movement of the sixties into three broad categories. The back-to-the-land hippie communes, the most publicized and notorious of the decade's experimental communities, were not the...