"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 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 gob-smacking roller coaster ride through the 1970s. Who knew the ‘Me Decade’ had such a wild, frightening, and, yeah, chaotic underbelly? An unending marvel chronicling the unsung hero of the underground press. Time to remove ‘un’ from ‘unknown’ and finally bestow Tom Forcade, faults and all (there are many!) to his rightful place among the founding fathers of First Amendment freedom fighters.”

Tom O’Neill, author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

"Like an obsessed detective hunting a man without a face, Sean Howe has turned the life of Tom Forcade into a detailed metaphor explaining why the seventies were sublime, why the seventies failed, and how those two things are intractably connected. No stone has been left unturned, and many have been overturned twice."

Chuck Klosterman, author of The Nineties

“Sean Howe, an intrepid spelunker of America’s underground archives, takes us on a dizzying ride through the hazy, contentious, loopy world of American radicalism in the 60s and 70s. In Tom Forcade, Howe has found the perfect character for tracing the multifarious histories of the era, from hippies to Yippies to Zippies, 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