It is the 60s yes it is magic, sex, drugs and rock and roll. In The Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind, Gary Lachman uncovers the Love Generation's roots in occultism and explores the dark side of the Age of Aquarius. 'He has produced an impressively researched guide to the odder aspects of a weird decade. Lachman reveals the Sixties as a period when the credulous were willingly led by the duplicitous. Spiritual tourists resurrected forgotten gurus like Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Blavatsky and the creepy Crowley. Lachman notes that the fraudulent Carlos Castaneda was published by the University of California. Such was the strange power of the repellent Charles Manson that Rolling Stone almost ran a cover declaring: 'Manson is innocent', until the paper interviewed him. The result was more accurately headlined: 'Is this the most dangerous man alive?' There is much in Lachman's book to entertain and inform those who wished they had lived through the Sixties and those who did but can't remember. If you want to know about, say, beatnik king Brion Gysin, ley-line apostle John Michell, and zen master Alan Watts, this is the place to start.' Chris Hirst in The Independent's paperback of the week