Agents of Chaos

“Like an obsessed detective hunting a man without a face, Sean Howe has turned the life of Tom Forçade into a detailed metaphor explaining why the seventies were sublime, why the seventies failed, and how those two things are intractably connected.”—Chuck Klosterman, author of The Nineties

“A dizzying ride through the hazy, contentious, loopy world of American radicalism in the sixties and seventies. In Tom Forçade, Howe has found the perfect character for tracing the multifarious histories of the era, from the parties and protests to the sativa-smogged subbasements where idealists, pranksters, and conspiracists clashed. Richly drawn, deadly serious, utterly comical, this book gave me a contact high!”—Joe Hagan, author of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine

“A gob-smacking roller coaster through the 1970s—who knew the ‘Me Decade’ had such a wild, frightening, and, yes, chaotic underbelly? It’s time to finally give Tom Forçade, faults and all, his rightful place among First Amendment freedom fighters.”—Tom O’Neill, author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Who was Tom Forçade? A revolutionary guru? A hippie con man? An undercover cop? In Sean Howe’s brilliant book, he’s a weird one-man secret history of seventies America, a mystery man who keeps showing up everywhere from the early underground press to the punk-rock explosion. Agents of Chaos turns this bizarre tale into an obsessively fascinating and addictive epic, like a countercultural thriller. This book is a brilliant jigsaw puzzle that also turns out to be a mirror.”—Rob Sheffield, author of Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

“A cautionary tale from the countercultural past, full of revolutionary glory and ugly criminality…. An impossibly tangled drama, but Howe chronicles it expertly. A fascinating resurrection from the dark side of the 1960s and ’70s.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)