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Accidental Eden: Hippie Days on Lasqueti Island Douglas L. Hamilton and Darlene Olesko Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2014. 253 pp. $24.95 paper.
HOWARD STEWART
University of British Columbia
A friend said recently that he didn't think much of the new generation of histories about British Columbia's "back-to-the-landers" in the 1960s and 1970s because if you weren't there, then the stories just don't mean that much to you. But not all these stories are equal. Susan Safyan (2012) recently wrote a pretty good one about the unique alternative community that grew up in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the province, at Wells, where counterculture lifestyles were supported by seasonal employment at nearby Barkerville Historic Town and Bowron Lake Provincial Park. And now Douglas Hamilton and Darlene Olesko have given us another great history, also published by Caitlin Press, about the exceptional collection of gifted, idealistic, stoic, and profoundly eccentric refugees, drifters, misfits, and...