Customer Reviews

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties (The Politically Incorrect Guides)

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For decades I've been telling people that America in the "sixties" were not what the media depicts as the sixties, but a much more complicated place - that people with long hair (like I had) walking along the road in a place like Vermont in 1969 (the sixties didn't get more "late" than 1969) had beer cans thrown at them, where in most parts of the country and for most years of the decade, the "sixties" was no more than a ripple disturbing the surface.
Leaf's book is invaluable at providing the facts and figures and anecdotes that show that I was right - that I wasn't dreaming. Of course it's an immense subject, but Leaf writes authortitavely and wittily about a well-chosen range of subjects.
The highest praise I can give it is that my little girls, aged 13 and 15, have taken it up to their room and are poring over it - and laughing over what their school teachers (too young to have experienced the decade) have been solemnly misinforming them about for years.
Get it and save your children's sanity and intellect - and if you are a child of the sixties, the soundness of your own memory.

If this Robin Williams line is true, so is its corollary: If you where there, you don't really remember it. Baby Boomers all were there and in too many cases they were formed by that decade and what they recall of it. And it turns out they really don't remember it. As long as the Largest Generation retains the commanding heights of much cultural and academic production, that is a problem.

Jonathan Leaf's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties is part of the solution. In 13 short, yet devastating, chapters covering everything from the sexual revolution to movies to Camelot to the nascent conservative movement, he demonstrates conclusively that everything most people think they know when asked about the Sixties is wrong.

Each of the phenomena described as universal Sixties experiences either occurred principally in earlier decades (e.g., civil rights, feminism), later decades (e.g., rock and roll), existed only a fringe or elite phenomenon (e.g., hippies and Haight-Ashbury), or is remembered in such a distorted or incomplete way as to approach falsehood (e.g., the moon landing, Camelot, many more). Just learning the facts about these well justifies buying and reading this book.

But even readers familiar the actual events of the Sixties will find reading rewarding. First, there is the author's erudite and accessible style which will occasion more than frequent chuckles even when recounting familiar facts. Second, the book is filled with facets and sidelights which will come as enlightening surprises even to those consider themselves well-informed.

For example, Malcolm X was a gay hustler--did that chapter of his Autobiography get cut? César Chávez and Tom Tancredo would have seen eye to eye on illegal immigration--does the University of California know that it closes down for a day every year to honor what most of its constituencies would consider a "hatemonger"?

Every baby boomer with a tendency to reminisce along the lines of the stereotypical images of the Sixties needs to read this highly entertaining debunking of Sixties mythologies. So should anybody who might come under their influence.

I always wondered how my parents managed to miss the Sixties. According to Jonathan Leaf, they were in very good company. Easy to read, fun, disturbing, and provocative, PIC '60s offers a counter weight for those of us who didn't live through America's best promoted, least experienced decade.

This is the kind of book I enjoy most, the kind that really helps crystallize my opinions on matters I had had a lot of vague, disorganized thoughts about before. As someone who actually lived through the Sixties (and has a certain sentimental attachment to them, mostly because they represent my youth), this book actually brought back a lot of memories, not all of them good. With the passage of time, I had forgotten the scuzziness and insanity of those years, and the mindlessness of radicalism which was fashionable at the time. Reading the political demands of the Black Panthers (the release of all black prisoners form jail), and the pronouncements of some of the feminists (all heterosexual sex is rape) brought it all back home. I found as I read the book that I was actually reliving some of those scenes, and political events, or at least my youthful impression of them. Leaf has done a lot to correct some of those youthful (mis)impressions.

The book was an education. I had known about the Altamont debacle before, but I hadn't known exactly WHY it happened. I had heard about JFK's ill health, but I hadn't known the details. I had vaguely sensed that the radicals were socialists, but I hadn't known exactly what their connections with hard core communists were. I had heard that the Black Panthers were a bunch of thugs, but hadn't known the details of their crimes. I hadn't been aware of the philosophical differences between Friedan and Steinem. I had known that the Beatles' music had stood the test of time better than many other rock groups, but I hadn't known WHY (the classical music training of their producer, George Martin, made for the much more creative arrangements on their songs). I had a vague recollection of Abe Fortas being corrupt, but hadn't known about the exact nature of his transgressions. And so on.

The media has always seemed to look down its collective nose at the Fifties, and the Seventies, and even the Eighties. (How could the media, with its usual biases, not despise a decade dominated by Reagan -- and at its end -- by the collapse of communism?) But the Sixties are a sort of sacred cow, and this book does a great job of skewering many of the myths which have sprung up around it.

Too often, people have viewed the Sixties through a narrow ideological lens, whether from the Left or the Right. Leaf does a great job documenting what really happened, without the ideological tunnel vision. What impresses me about Jonathan Leaf's book is the degree to which he comments authoritatively on so many different aspects of social and cultural life: from fashion to music to public policy to intellectual movements. I learned a lot from this book -- and many cultural historians will do the same.

The 1960's (and '70's)for those of us who lived it, wrote in it, painted in it, composed in it was an age of hypocrisy. Jonathan Leaf's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties nails it right in rhe radical-red dot on its forehead. He is a literary Dennis Miller. He does his own thing. My recommendation: Don't "steal this book." Buy it.

I recommend this to every concerned American citizen under the age of 50. As we begin to grapple with the reality that the economic and political model which has been our reality for fifty years is kaput , this brilliant diatribe will stimulate you to think about what each of us can do to recreate an America that can stand on its own feet. We better hurry.
Jonathan Leaf is unsparing in his assault on the mythology of the 60s promoted relentlessly by people who were not there, by people who were there and misrepresent what they did and saw. The most powerful motive behind the mythologizing of the 60s, looking back now, I believe arose from a desire to escape the horrible realities revealed by the assassinations, the riots, the personal violence in the inner cities that spread unchecked relentlessly into the 70s. (I was robbed four times at gun point in the 1980s in Manhattan, once in my bedroom.)
Leaf reminds us what a terrible president JFK was, but more important he details how the Democrats in Illinois stole the election. We knew this at the time and I recall thinking it was a good thing. Then came the Bay of Pigs which turned all of us on the "soft left" against him. The real left at the time was composed of the children of banned Communists, fellow travelers, and professional agitators employed by the Russians and Chinese. Those on the soft left were active in movements to promote world government and to ban nuclear weapons. When Kennedy involved us in a nuclear confrontation with Russia centered on establishing missile bases in Cuba, we went into active opposition. None of us knew where Vietnam was but we opposed the buildup there and when Johnson turned it into a major war SDS became a name.
The United States was defeated in Vietnam by the Vietnamese, not by SDS which came to be dominated by violent and misguided children, manipulated by Communist professionals. In the midst of the chaos and shame accompanying the murders and riots, LBJ institutionalized the New Deal with the Great Society programs which have grown relentlessly, destroying the independence of the States, and creating a one party system I call the National Treasury Party. Well, the party is over. Leaf's account of this imaginary decade is an excellent place to begin your rethinking of America.
Looking back to my youth I believe the two most important "facts" of the time was the arrival of birth control pills and fear of nuclear holocaust. Chastity has always been overrated and exaggerated but everyone born in the 1930s well remembers "the great pussy drought of the 50s". By the mid 60s we believed we were headed for sexual paradise. What actually happened is we all became sluts. The other great concern, one not spoken of because we were helpless in its face, was the fear of nuclear extermination. This drove the flight of many in my generation toward drugs or what came much later to be called "sex, drugs and rock and roll." This fear made Americans needy for reassurance from Washington, increasing our dependence which the political class encouraged with endless programs to buy off one constituency or another. Welfare for the poor and the black which Leaf details was trivial compared with welfare for the rich, but both forms have undermined the fabric of the Republic.
The 1960s was a time of great prosperity, the time when the generation which had not fought the war, the war in which so few (relatively) died for the benefit of so many, enjoyed the fruits of victory and power. In fact as Leaf details nicely we were powerless, largely ignored, which is why the Vietnam war rolled on until 1975 despite the pathetic, murderous efforts of misguided and manipulated "student activists". Odd, when you hear the reminiscences of those good old days somehow the murders in Mississippi, the murder of Mary Jo Kopeckne, the hundreds of nameless shopkeepers gunned down by "revolutionary" black men, the murder of MLK and Bobby are left out and we are given the anthem of the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane and Bob Dylan.
We are now living with the wreckage of that time all around us while the heirs of LBJ and Mayor Daley work feverishly to double down their handiwork and enthrall us in a downward spiral they will lead. This is exactly the right time to read Jonathan Leaf's sobering account of the decade that really never happened.

I have this book in the kitchen so I can browse through it and read out bits to my husband. We both laugh. I spent part of the sixties living on an Army base and part in grad school, plus some time in New York City, so I consider I experienced a lot of "sixtieses." This book tells me things I remember, things I suspected at the time, and things I had no idea about. Very funny, and very very smart.

Woodstock has become the symbol of a decade of free love, but in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties author Jonathan Leaf rejects the idea that the era fostered radical change in all society. This book tells how radical factions took over movements such as civil rights and feminism and replaced their ideas with more extreme methods and ideas - and it tells of a decade dominated by cultural conservatism and family values, instead. An excellent alternative viewpoint.

After growing up in California and hearing the Sixties mythologized constantly by my teachers, it was a refreshing relief to have those myths debunked. It gets tiresome and tiring to have the Baby Boomers constantly laud this decade of "progressiveness and (gulp) change" when I always suspected that it was just self-indulgent misremembering. Those tales cannot withstand the witty and well-researched prose of this excellent book. Leaf takes on a whole decade, from politics to culture to fashion, and consistently and pitilessly lays bare the whole enterprise. The only sad thing about the book is to realize just how pervasive the myths have become. I highly recommend PIC 60s as a quick, enjoyable, informative read.