The Cookbook: Coming of Age in Turbulent Times is an autobiography and retrospective written by William Powell, author of The Anarchist Cookbook . Released 50 years after T.A.C.'s original release in 1969, it's a timely and compelling look at the 60's counterculture in the USA and how anger and disenfranchisement led to the writing and publication of one of the most notorious books in modern history. This autobiography is brutally honest and unflinching. The author makes few apologies and uses the platform to instead provide profound insights and analyses about western society and humans in general.

Released 16th June 2019, it's 258 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats.

In his professional adult career, William Powell devoted his energies to education and helping non-traditional students. He disavowed T.A.C. and gave very few interviews or explanations about his earlier life. He spends some time to carefully examine how the writing (as an angry 19 year old) transformed and informed his later adult life and choices.

I was in tears several times reading about what he went through as a child and young man and the raw emotion from the (hopefully) cathartic process of writing it down and putting it out there. Whatever else he was (he sadly died in 2016) he was a masterful and compelling writer.

I am just about 15 years younger than the author, but I remember the anger and upheaval of the late 60's and early 70's in the USA (and the world). The rapid change and disaffection caused by so many disparate factors (globalization, military engagements to which the majority of people were opposed, gender and racial battles) changed the cultural landscape. I see -so- many parallels with current events that it's scary. The political and cultural upheaval happening today are eerily analogous to the pressure cooker which birthed the cultural revolution.

It could so easily have devolved into self-aggrandizement and chest thumping and blame displacement and it didn't. It's a raw examination of culture and invitation for readers to engage in self examination and (hopefully) inspiration to take responsibility to improve our society in a non-violent manner for all of us.

Worth noting for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. This title is available in the KU subscription.

I recommend this book unreservedly. This would make a superlative support text for everything from creative writing, to history, to gender and racial studies, to political science. This is an important book.

Five stars. I wish I could give it more.

The Cookbook is a fascinating memoir of a man growing up and leaving childish things behind. William Powell grows up during the radical counter-culture of the 1960's and 1970's. He turns away from his parents and gets angry at Richard Nixon's America.
Powell writes The Anarchist's Cookbook. It is full of suggestions for violent struggle against a country carpet bombing Cambodia and Laos.
What happens next is more interesting. Powell becomes interested in teaching children that have been left behind by the Education system.
He dedicates the bulk of his life to helping children with educational needs. On many occasions his having written the Cookbook comes back to haunt him. This is a great read about a now humble man I knew nothing about. Four stars.

Like what seems like every Gen-X male with access to a modem in the 1980s, I had a dot-matrix printout of "The Anarchist Cookbook," found on some now-forgotten BBS. Like most of us, I didn't actually do anything with the information - just the possession of such a forbidden "book" was a different kind of than the magazines that may have been stored with it under our mattresses, but it was a thrill nonetheless. Upon seeing this book, my middle-aged mind went back to those days...then came back as I realized I had no idea who had written it - I had assumed it was a compilation under a pseudonym - assuming my copy even had an author listed.

I found William Powell's story fascinating - through his life, from his radical youth to his contributions to society of a vastly different sort - but still revolutionary in its way. It filled in a hole in my youthful mind that I didn't notice was there until now. Highly recommended.

This book was interesting. There were some bizarre how to items, such as how to get high from bananas. I wonder how many people actually went and bought all of those bananas to try it. Lol!