UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Roberta Price

Winner of the 2006 Zia Award from the New Mexico
Press Women

A vivid account of one woman's seven-year sojourn on a hippie commune in Colorado

With a strong, distinctive voice, Roberta Price recalls the years she spent in the Huerfano ("Orphan") Valley when it was a petrie dish of countercultural experiments. Documenting her story with photos as well as words, and placing it in the larger context of the times, she describes her participation in the antiwar movement, the advent of the women's movement, and her encounters with such icons as Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Abbie Hoffman, Stewart Brand, Allen Ginsburg, and Baba Ram Dass.

"A wonderful memoir of learning, doing, sharing, and loving. . . . The sunshine of this book is in the telling: humorous, resonant, occasionally pained, but always life-embracing."

ForeWord

"For many people a road not taken that is fascinating to read about. . . . Libre was no utopia, but its members were committed and it felt more like family than the nuclear kind. . . . Sweet children, with a sweet, sweet dream."

Los Angeles Times Book Review

"I like this book. I like its attention to detail, its honesty, and the author's clear distinctive voice. . . . More than a tale of communes and hippies, Huerfano is a classic coming-of-age story, in which a young woman learns life's lessons, one by one."

The Santa Fe New Mexican

"A pungent, colorful, accurate chronicle of the politics, aspirations, social experiments, high and low comedy and blunders of the time that deserves a wide audience."

Peter Coyote, actor and author of Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

"A splendid book that beautifully captures the spirit of the moment, and it does so in the best possible way—by recollecting and working through the specific details so often lost to memory and history. Huerfano is a virtual archive of data—an early edition of The Whole Earth Catalog come with a compelling narrative and vivid characters."

Nick Bromell, author of Tomorrow Never Knows:
Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s

"An impressive and important book. There is a paucity of good literature on the commune movement of the '60s and '70s, and much stereotypic misrepresentation of the counterculture. What Price's memoir reminds us is that the counterculture was intensely political, although the politics were personal as well as national."

Alexander Bloom, coeditor of "Takin' It to the Streets": A Sixties Reader

"If Huerfano, at first glance, looks like yet another self-congratulatory tome about hippiedom, think again. Price is a serious-minded writer with a nuanced take on the times."

Austin American-Statesman

Roberta Price is a writer and practicing attorney specializing in intellectual property rights. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Memoir / American Studies
376 pp., 13 color and 47 black-and-white illus.
$22.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-573-9
September 2006
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