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The Sixties
Years of Hope, Days of Rage
Gitlin, Todd Publisher: Bantam Books, New York, USA
Year Published: 1987
Pages: 514pp Price: $15.95 ISBN: 0-533-34601-6
Library of Congress Number: E841.G57 1987 Dewey: 973.922
Resource Type: Book
One of the best books on the Sixties in the U.S., bringing to life the political and cultural currents, including especially the music, which raged during that decade, and setting them in historical context.
Abstract: One of the best books on the Sixties in the U.S., bringing to life the political and cultural currents, including especially the music, which raged during that decade, and setting them in historical context. Gitlin attempts, with much success, to evoke "the spirit of the time from the interior, yet without succumbing to the hallucinatory giddiness of the late Sixties especially, whose sheer wildness, even now, seems the stuff of another century."
His account reaches back to the Fifties as well, noting the stirrings of change which made that decade "a seedbed as well as a cemetery." In the context of our own more conservative times (at least in the Western nations), we will want to take note of Gitlin's description of "the self-satisfied Fifties" as "criss-crossed by underground channels where the conventional wisdoms of the time were resisted, undermined, weakened. It was in these enclaves of elders and subterranean channels, rivulets, deep-running springs -- or backwaters and swamps, depending on your point of view -- that unconventional wisdoms, moods and mystiques were nurtured."
Gitlin sees the civil rights movement as perhaps the key factor in sparking the political movements of the Sixties, the thing that made pockets of cultural resistance open up into political activism.
[Abstract by Ulli Diemer]
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