Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders

In August 1969, members of charismatic leader Charles Manson's countercultural "family" mur­dered some of Hollywood's "beautiful people," most famously Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant at the time. The killers left be­hind evidence intended to implicate Black radi­cals and to trigger an apocalyptic race war. What happened instead was that the gruesome murders placed the entire counterculture under suspicion and then came to mean, in Joan Didion's formulation, the end of the six...