cover image Fug You: An Informal History 
of the Peace Eye Bookstore, 
the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, 
and the Counterculture in the Lower East Side

Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and the Counterculture in the Lower East Side

Ed Sanders. Da Capo, $26 (416p) ISBN 978-0-306-81888-2

Sanders, best known for his 1971 book on the Charles Manson murders (The Family), engagingly depicts how the culture of New York City in the 1960s shifted from the beats to the hippies. In this “book of remembrances” as he “surged through the decade on my own little missions,” Sanders has chosen “to accentuate the energy, the wild fun, the joyful creativity, and the schemes of Better World derring-do.” He tells many stories about his work with such friends as Allen Ginsberg, Jonas Mekas, Charles Olson, and Abbie Hoffman—and provides his own fascinating perspective on the birth and trial of the Chicago Seven. Sanders includes a detailed history of his Peace Eye Bookstore, which played a crucial role as the epicenter of the counterculture of New York’s Lower East Side (and has served as a model for every underground bookstore since). Above all, it means a generous helping of stories about Sanders’s band the Fugs, whose visionary combination of “poetry, satire, and antiwar fervor” on such albums as “It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest,” is now considered truly revolutionary. (Jan.)