The Sixties - Softcover

Peter Stine (editor)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814325580 ISBN 13: 9780814325582

Publisher: Wayne State University Press, 1995

Synopsis

The Sixties is a powerful literary anthology written by individuals who witnessed and participated in that revolutionary decade. Their stories, recollected in relative tranquility, illuminate this remarkable time, lifting the curtain of amnesia and media distortion that has been triggered by the decade's inadmissible truths. Indeed this decade left in its wake painful and disturbing memories. The Vietnam War still haunts us. The civil rights movement changed race relations and the face of the South forever, yet lost Martin Luther King's vision of brotherly love. The utopian living experiment of the counterculture degenerated into a spectacle of disease, hunger, false messiahs and violence. And the bullets of assassins ushered in two decades of ""accidental"" presidencies. The essays, fiction and poetry in ""The Sixties"" recpature the complexity of events, providing personal, reflective and diverse testimony on a decade driven by an obsessive will to change. John Lewis's experiences with SNCC or Rosellen Brown's at Tougaloo College are moral light years removed from P.J. O'Rourke's hilarious encounter with the Balto Cong in Baltimore. It requires mind expansion to imagine Peter Najaran's first exposure to the counterculture in San Francisco as contemporaneous with Richard Currey's initiation into killing in Vietnam. Maxine Hong Kingston's depiction of head-adventures in the Bay Area forms an unlikely parallel with Tom Hayden's experiences in the streets of Chicago in 1968. Charged with folly and tragedy, the 1960s also saw daring and unacknowledged heroism on many fronts. ""The Sixties"" explodes any simplification about the decade and rekindles in us a sense of wonder about our recent past.

About this title

About the Author

Todd Gitlin, an American author of sixteen books, is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Whole World Is Watching and Inside Prime Time, and a novel, The Murder of Albert Einstein, as well as editor of Watching Television. His articles on politics and culture have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New Republic, Dissent, Tikkun, and many other periodicals and newspapers.

From the Inside Flap

e Sixties" and the images start  coming, images of a time when all authority was  defied and millions of young Americans thought they  could change the world--either through music,  drugs, and universal love or by "putting their  bodies on the line" against injustice and  war.
Todd Gitlin, the highly regarded  writer, media critic, and professor of sociology at  the University of California, Berkeley, has written  an authoritative and compelling account of this  supercharged decade--a decade he helped shape as an  early president of Students for a Democratic  Society (SDS) and an organizer of the first national  demonstration against the Vietnam war. Part  critical history, part personal memoir, part celebration,  and part meditation, this critically acclaimed  work resurrects a generation on all its gl

Edition details

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814325580
• ISBN 13: 9780814325582
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304