Culture Gap: Towards a New World in the Yalakom Valley

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The time is the early 1980s. Judith Plant and her new partner, Kip, are ready for a change. Inspired by the charismatic Fred Brown, their communications professor at Simon Fraser University, they join a commune in a remote valley near the Yalakom River, deep in BC's Coast Mountains. Culture Gap: Towards a New World in the Yalakom Valley tells the story of that sojourn. The challenges and privations, the joys and adventures of rural communal living, form the backdrop to the human drama the author recounts. Judith and Kip's family includes her children; Willie takes to the new life, but his sisters feel the strong pull of the life they left behind. Meanwhile Fred, the inspiration for the commune, stricken with cancer, is dying. An absorbing account of a lifestyle emblematic of a time, Culture Gap also shows, from her own older perspective, a young mother's struggles to reconcile her social ideals of personal and environmental responsibility, and loving and caring for those closest to her. Culture Gap is number 22 in the Transmontanus series of books. "Glows with wisdom, complexity, and compassion. A noble read." -- Stephanie Mills, author of Epicurean Simplicity and In Service of the Wild