Publishers Weekly
08/07/2023
Proving that truth can be stranger than fiction, this rollicking history from journalist Howe (Marvel Comics) details the exploits of Thomas King Forçade, who ran the Underground Press Syndicate (“a consortium of the largest and most influential independent” counterculture newspapers) in the 1970s and founded High Times magazine in 1974. Forçade’s coverage, Howe notes, often focused on marijuana, exploring how the use of herbicides on Mexican marijuana fields posed health risks to smokers and stirring up outrage over the 1971 arrest of legalization activist Dana Beal. Forçade and his cohort endured FBI surveillance, police raids, and legal troubles, including Forçade’s arrest for protesting Richard Nixon’s 1972 renomination in Miami, which only hardened Forçade’s antiestablishment convictions. Howe offers a nuanced portrait of his subject, finding amusement in Forçade’s zany escapades (he once evaded a police raid at the High Times office by escaping to the roof and jumping to a neighboring building) while pointing out his sometimes muddled logic (“We don’t break any laws or confront the establishment,” Forçade once said while heading the United Press Syndicate, despite having moonlighted as a drug runner). This captures the freewheeling spirit of the counterculture’s troubled march through the 1970s. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
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] gritty investigation.”—The New York Times
“A fascinating, anecdote-packed tale of drugs, guns, and magazine publishing.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Sean Howe’s story of the mysterious hell-bound founder of High Times magazine, as well as the scandals, tragedies and FBI informants that followed in his dank wake, is both wild fun and essential cultural history.”—Los Angeles Times
“The tale of this now often-forgotten underground figure is told by author Sean Howe in bold and lustrous detail—fit for any film….The book also doubles as a history of the countercultural political groups and figures of the era. That’s a positive in that it fleshes out the story and the times….[I]n Agents of Chaos, Sean Howe unravels his riveting and far-reaching tale.”—Houston Press
“Reading Sean Howe’s Agents of Chaos can feel like entering a kind of mirror world…[an] immersive, eye-opening dip into a world discombobulatingly like our own, and yet so different.”—The Globe and Mail
“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)
"[A] rollicking history....Howe offers a nuanced portrait of his subject, finding amusement in Forçade’s zany escapades (he once evaded a police raid at the High Times office by escaping to the roof and jumping to a neighboring building) while pointing out his sometimes muddled logic (“We don’t break any laws or confront the establishment,” Forçade once said while heading the United Press Syndicate, despite having moonlighted as a drug runner). This captures the freewheeling spirit of the counterculture’s troubled march through the 1970s."—Publishers Weekly
“The story of [High Times] founder Thomas King Forçade — is even more complex and dramatic than you might expect. With his new book Agents of Chaos, Sean Howe explores the paradoxes at the heart of Forçade — and the conflicts they led him into.”—Inside Hook
“As Howe’s book describes in colorful, rollicking detail, Tom Forcade lived a life any outlaw would envy. In a culture where the outlaw holds a certain allure and respect, even though they all too often end up dying a violent death, Agents of Chaos gives Tom Forcade’s life the renown it deserves.”—Counterpunch
“Sean Howe takes readers on a heady, edgy, sometimes eerie ride.”—Crime Reads
“Wild….Awesome cover, awesome read. Pick it up; you won’t regret it."—FAQNYC/THE CITY
“[Howe] create[s] a vivid narrative look at the forces that were driving (and being driven by) a cultural transformation, giving the reader ringside seats to the battles within and without the movement….While the broad outlines of this story have been extensively studied and explored, Howe gives us a granular, ground-level account loaded with big personalities and small conflicts, and trusts us to recognize the larger connections….Complex, hilarious, and deeply bizarre….Howe does some valuable research into Forcade’s past and uncovers some surprising details…he lets Forcade’s unbelievable, incoherent, impossibly American career speak for itself, wisely allowing readers to draw their own conclusions….Who Thomas King Forcade really was and why he did what he did will probably always remain a mystery, but the times and circles in which he moved will always provide clear lessons about the limits of dissent, the power of dreams, the corruption of power, the determination of the powerful, and the all-consuming lure of the fast buck.”—Spectrum Culture
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-06-21
A cautionary tale from the countercultural past, full of revolutionary glory and ugly criminality.
In 1963, Gary Goodson (1945-1978) left his home in Phoenix, Arizona, to study business at the University of Utah. Discharged from the Air Force for perceived psychological problems, Goodson transformed himself into Thomas King Forçade—the latter tellingly pronounced to rhyme with facade—and found his fortune in two parallel careers. The first, writes former Entertainment Weekly editor Howe, was taking over the operations of a faltering alternative-press venture called the Underground Press Syndicate, whose purpose was “to pool the resources of dozens of budget-crunched publications, to share the content and revenue from national advertising deals.” Forçade’s new career soon drew the attention of the Phoenix police and their own underground, a network of outwardly groovy informants, and then, in time, the Secret Service and the FBI. One of Forçade’s most glorious moments as a muckraking journalist was demanding White House and other governmental access for underground newspapers, prevailing in a court case that, Howe notes, was cited as precedent when the Trump White House tried to expel journalist Jim Acosta nearly half a century later. A revolutionary rabble-rouser with ties to the Yippie offshoot called the Zippies, and on the enemy’s list of older activists such as Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg, Forçade proved a brilliant firebrand. He was also a good capitalist, playing both sides of the legal fence. He smuggled and sold drugs of all kinds and, in 1974, launched the magazine High Times, born, according to one account, when “we were sitting around getting stoned on nitrous oxide and laughing gas one day when someone said ‘Hey, why not write about getting high?’ ” The magazine was instantly successful, which oddly seemed to accelerate Forçade’s downward psychological spiral and its tragic conclusion. It adds up to an impossibly tangled drama, but Howe chronicles it expertly.
A fascinating resurrection from the dark side of the 1960s and ’70s.
