| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Rise and Fall of Synanon: A California Utopia. By Rod Janzen. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xii, 300 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8018-6583-2.)

A visitor to Point Reyes Station today would find upscale restaurants, an organic market, and vacation cottages snuggled in and around the dramatic bay where Francis Drake landed in 1579. Thirty years ago it was a hippie haven, cheek to jowl with a thriving agricultural community; a place where bikers roared in on weekends; and the home of Synanon, populated by former drug addicts and communal life-stylers. 1

Rod Janzen has pieced together the first retrospective narrative history of the group, tracing both the trajectory of the organization and the contradictory life of Chuck Dederich, its founding guru. Synanon became associated in the public mind with the attempted murder of a dissident member by some loyalists of Dederich who placed a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a 'splitee.' Synanon's origins were idealistic, and Janzen is interested in rescuing the group from the implications of the 'rattlesnake incident' and reminding us that it was out of the drug-infested chaos of Los Angeles and San Francisco that this anarchistic countercultural movement emerged. It lasted, according to Janzen and to its credit, for thirty-three years. . . .

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