Charles Manson. The Man Who Murdered the Sixties; Arcturus, 2019

Fifty years after Charles Manson's shocking murders, the American true crime writer David J. Krajicek takes a fresh look at his life and crimes in a portrait of evil that reveals the dark side of the swinging Sixties. Using Manson's own words and those of his naive followers, Krajicek, a former professor of journalism at Columbia University, shows how the manipulative ex-convict managed to build a harem of acolytes who committed murder on his behalf, including that of the emerging film star Sharon Tate. Krajicek portrays Manson, raised amid impoverished Appalachian despair, as an unlikely messiah. Freshly paroled after spending most of his young life locked up, he stumbled into San Francisco in 1967 just as thousands of impressionable young people were streaming into town for the Summer of Love. Using skills of manipulation he gained in prison, Manson assembled his personal commune cult of hippies, three-quarters of whom were women. He began to control their bodies and minds as they moved from one LA flop to the next, graduating from peace and love to horrific acts of violence that shook the world.

The narrative is framed by the seminal events of the time-the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, race riots, space exploration, and the emergence of the drug-happy hippie culture and psychedelic music scene. Charles Manson became the personification of Flower Power gone to seed.