There’s a lot of hoopla in New York these days around the 40th Anniversary of the Summer of Love. In Williamsburg and East Village, street vendors’ stalls are clogged with tie-dye, incense, peace pipes and Beat Anthologies. Last month was Hippie Fest at Seaside Park in Brooklyn, featuring Turtles and Zombies reunions. The Whitney even cashed in on the theme with its Summer of Love exhibit.

And now, on Third Avenue, Citadel Press Books has reissued Peter O. Whitmer’s (former Turtles drummer) Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created The Sixties Counterculture. First published in 1987, Aquarius resurrects seven kingpins - Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Tom Robbins, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, and Hunter Thompson - who made the ephemera of Flower Power possible.

Imagine that you’re driving by a roadside where you see your all-time hero hitchhiking. Now imagine picking him or her up? What would you say?

Peter O. Whitmer had this experience in 1969 when he saw none other than Timothy Leary bumming a ride at Berkeley. A former Catholic schoolboy and West Point cadet, Leary was among the first to not only administer LSD to civilians, but to also advocate its use as an agent of creativity and self-discovery. Along with one of my own heroes, Richard Alpert (aka, Ram Dass), Leary was also among the first to be fired from Harvard for doing this. He then went on to coin the rallying cry, "Tune in. Turn on. Drop out," before becoming both jailbird and jailbreaker. By 1969, his polemics were required reading in Berkeley’s psych department, where Whitmer had been a student.

Leary was feeling groovy in Whitmer’s car, flashing peace signs and punctuating every sentence with "man," when Whitmer asked him for his views on a certain theory in Interpersonal Psychology. According to Whitmer, Leary turned on a dime and launched into an oration that only the most distinguished scholar could pull off. How did Leary go from Harvard goon to hippy guru? And, let’s recall, Leary’s was by no means the only such metamorphosis of its day.

From the moment Leary left the car, Whitmer vowed to uncover what lay behind this "finger-snap change of a generation of dull brown caterpillars into a nation of gaudy butterflies." This proved no small feat. After nearly two decades of investigative research, Whitmer still could not come up with the definitive explanation. Nor has anyone else. PBS, for example, put out a six-part documentary called Making Sense Of The Sixties (1991), which, though a masterwork, didn’t even come close to doing what it’s title said it’d be doing. At the end of the day, we’re left with titles like Aquarius Revisited as we’re stuck looking to astrology for answers.

Nonetheless, Whitmer left us with a landmark exposé on the Sixties seven patriarchs:

Timothy Leary: Whitmer herds us through Timothy Leary’s tumultuous life - from his Irish Catholic upbringing, to his ill-starred West Point days, to his professorship at Harvard, to his lysergic junkets from the lab to the road, to his imprisonment, to his escape, to his exile in Europe, to his return to prison, to his latter days as a family man.

Norman Mailer: In "Electronic Mailer," Whitmer introduces Norman Mailer as a bourgeois bohemian, hell-bent on "immersing himself in situations that might provide the ground for future writing." Arguably the most literary of Whitmer’s rebels, the marijuana-toting, wife-stabbing, White Negro-writing Mailer is the first in the book to elegize Jack Kerouac, whose name remains enshrined all the way to the last page.

Ken Kesey: Whitmer shows Ken Kesey (author, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) shucking the publishing industry, Hollywood hangers-on, and his Merry Pranksters to homestead with this wife and kids in Oregon.

Tom Robbins: Tom Robbins seems the most introverted of the lot, his insurrections being more in prose than in deed, even before he holed up behind a mountain in La Conner, Washington to churn out a spate of great books.

Hunter S. Thompson and William Burroughs’ sagas comprise Aquarius’ strongest chapters. Good God, the lives they led! Norman Mailer called Thompson, "a legend in successful self-abuse," and claimed: "If I lived life one day the way that Hunter does, I would be in the hospital. If I did it for three days, I would be dead." The archetypal Gonzo journalist knew how to approach a subject with a sledgehammer, sparing no feeling or reputation in pounding out a point. From his days with the Hell’s Angels to his shotgun-cocking days in Big Sur to his end days at Rolling Stone - the extremes were just foreskin for Hunter Thompson.

So too for Burroughs. He started writing his first novel, Junkie, at 35 after he shot his wife through the forehead, following a bizarre exchange at a party in Mexico City, where she agreed to play William Tell in front of his .38 Star Pistol. Shortly afterwards, Burroughs jumped bail and took his grief, writing career and addictions to Tangiers, where he consoled himself by fornicating with any Ganymede who’d offer himself up for a bag of hash. And that’s only about one-one-millionth of Burroughs’ revels and dares. Whitmer does an exceptional job of exploring Burroughs’ utterly original creative evolution as he ground life’s balls to bits in Paris, London, rehab, and ultimately Kansas.

Unfortunately, Whitmer also offers the world something it could do without: another paean to Allen Ginsberg. Let me say straight out that I’ve always looked at Ginsberg with a jaundiced eye. In my college seminar paper on Walt Whitman, I commented that, "Allen Ginsberg’s wildly over-praised Howl is nothing more than a name-dropping scene-stealer’s manic attempt at hipster acclaim." He’s always seemed to me all gimmick, no substance. Whitmer’s true-to-life depictions did little to sway me from this long-held position. What baffles me, though, is how geniuses like Bob Dylan and Patti Smith could fall for and stand by Ginsberg’s shtick. But he did use swear words, he did catch on among a lot of Sixties crazies and he was populist, so I guess he can’t escape mention.

Twenty years after the 1987 publication of Aquarius Revisited, only two of the seven men are still alive, Tom Robbins, 71, and Norman Mailer, 84. Burroughs died of a heart attack in 1997, the same year Ginsberg died of cancer. Ken Kesey died of liver cancer in 2001. Timothy Leary committed suicide in 1996. Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide in 2005.

Some people snort and say that the Sixties didn’t accomplish anything. In Aquarius, Burroughs’ response to that is, "They don’t seem to realize that [in the 1940s], four-letter words did not appear on printed pages...the idea that a Mexican or a black or a queer was anything but a second-class citizen was simply absurd." But he also said, "The 1960s stuff about solving the world’s problems through peace and love and nonviolence - I said then that the only way to give flowers to the police was in a pot from a high window."

Whitmer attributes the fall of the Flower Children to two causes: (1) "There were no leaders, just a lot of followers" and (2) the inevitable bastardization and commercialization of the hippy look and lifestyle: "It was a case of ’we have met the enemy and they have bought us.’" Others attribute it to a peace delusion, claiming the Sixties came to full bloom at Woodstock in August 1969 and got stomped to death five months later at The Rolling Stones’ murderous concert at Altamont. As Dylan sang in Street-Legal, "If you don’t believe there’s a price/For this sweet paradise/Just remind me to show you the scars." Aquarius Revisited shows a new era the highs, lows, and lessons of butterflies that once flew free but could not remain in flight.