The Sixties

The Sixties is a powerful literary anthology written by women and men who witnessed and participated in that revolutionary decade in U.S. history. Their essays, fiction, and poetry capture 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 Najarian'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-adventurers 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. This volume explodes any simplification about the decade and rekindles in us a sense of wonder about our recent past.

The author was elected president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963, and he brings an insider's perspective to bear on the turbulent whirl of political, social, and sexual rebellion we now call "the sixties." Gitlin does a nice job of integrating his first-person recollections with a broader history that ranges from the roots of 1960s revolt in 1950s affluence and complacency to the movement's apocalyptic collapse in the early 1970s--a victim of its own excesses as well as governmental persecution. His lucid summary of the complex strands that intertwined to form the counterculture is essential basic reading for those who don't know the difference between the Diggers and the Yippies. --Wendy Smith