Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the '60s - Hardcover

Beidler, Philip D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820316415 ISBN 13: 9780820316413

Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr, 1994

Synopsis

At the heart of Scriptures for a Generation are dozens of detailed entries discussing individual writers and the particular importance of their texts - bona fide '60s classics ranging from The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five to Carlos Casteneda's The Teachings of Don Juan and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves. Represented as well are such works of revered elders as Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Beidler's coverage also extends to works of the early '70s that are clearly textual and spiritual extensions of the '60s: the Portola Institute's Last Whole Earth Catalog, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and others. An overview of reading and writing as both a product and prime mover of '60s culture precedes the main section. In his conclusion Beidler highlights the most notable efforts to document and interpret the era.

About this title

About the Author

Philip D. Beidler is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.

Reviews

The political activism and social change of the 1960s were generated in part, according to Beidler, by the books published and read widely by students during that decade. Beidler, a professor of English at the University of Alabama, cogently critiques '60s writers whose books challenged entrenched ideas of race, class and gender, such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. Also represented are '60s theorists (Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown); antiwar novelists (Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller); and cultural revolutionaries (Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary). Beidler argues that the period was the last time a generation of Americans would respond so dramatically to the printed word; future cultural discourse, he maintains, will be dominated by audio-visual and electronic communication.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Beidler (Rewriting America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation, Univ. of Georgia Pr., 1991) celebrates the diversity of texts that both shaped the Zeitgeist of the Sixties and was born of that counterculture. It takes some insight (and memory) to confer on the anonymous, antidrug cautionary Go Ask Alice the same respect given Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. Indeed, Beidler's survey at times is too nonselective: Did Jerry Rubin really have anything to say that Abbie Hoffman didn't? This is an academic discourse with appeal to a certain popular audience, and Beidler concludes with an excellent bibliographical essay. Serious students might wish he had written a more ambitious, thematic book; instead, his chosen figures are in alphabetical order, so that Kahlil Gibran and Allen Ginsberg are adjacent but not Betty Friedan and Kate Millett. Recommended for all academic libraries that value provocative nonfiction.
Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0820316415
• ISBN 13: 9780820316413
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256