"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.