"This is a deeply researched and colorfully written account of the disastrous symbolic end to the 1960s." -- Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review "Critical and poignant, a thoroughly researched exploration of the ultimate price tag for the end of the 1960s." -- Kirkus "Highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of rock music." --Library Journal "A carefully constructed examination of an incident that changed the course of popular history." -- Booklist Starred Review "Austerlitz brings multiple shadow players to centre stage over the course of a thoroughly researched text, knitting their stories together expertly and providing the reader with a sense of the pre-concert chaos, the mayhem while it took place and the strange cultural settlement afterwards." -- The National "This deeply researched book, full of human detail, is essentially a true-crime narrative, shedding light on the darkest, most troubling moment of the sixties counterculture and all that led up to it and followed from it. It is a riveting piece of documentary writing." --Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden and Dancing in the Dark "Rough, sickening, blasted, detailed.

The focus on Meredith Hunter and his family is heroic." --Greil Marcus "Austerlitz has written the definitive account of this tumultuous moment in American music history." --Ted Gioia, music historian and author of Delta Blues and The History of Jazz "Austerlitz offers an evenhanded insight into all the players. Especially welcome is the full portrait of Meredith Hunter, the doomed young man trapped in the maelstrom." --Andrew Grant Jackson, author of 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music "Culture journalist Saul Austerlitz frames his book as a crime story, opening with a visit to see Dixie Ward -- Taammi's long-suffering mother, Meredith's sister -- and concluding with the 1970 acquittal of Alan Passaro, the Hells Angels biker who attacked Hunter. It's a good strategy." -- Boston Globe "For anyone who wants to be reminded that rock 'n' roll has always had a dystopian element, Altamont is never more than a shot away -- "Altamont," of course, being not just the name of a long-vacant speedway in Northern California but also shorthand for the end of the '60s, the death of the counterculture and the ultimate correction to Woodstock idealism. That's a lot of weight for one disastrous concert to cover, but Saul Austerlitz's recounting re-establishes that the Dec.

6, 1969, show headlined by the Rolling Stones is still just about up to the sorry task." -- SF Chronicle.