Customer Reviews

The Portable Sixties Reader (Penguin Classics)

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I found this to be an exellent primer on the 60's. Not only are many of the big names covered like MLK, Timothy Leary, and Hunter S. Thompson but lesser voices are heard too. I also enjoyed the divisions of the book into sections like Civil Rights, Counter Culture, and Drug Culture. Along with the books mentioned in the introduction this Reader provides many directions to go in understanding the 60's.

This book is filled from front to back in all 628 of its pages with hate, prejudice, despair, disgust, delusion, sickness, love, happiness, faith, civility, truth, and humanity; in short, it is a wonderful compendium of writings from (and sometimes about) the 1960s in America and the experience of that turbulent decade did to the American mass consciousness. I wasn't there for the 60s, but I think that this book does a very good job of capturing the spirit of times as best as it can be captured. The only objection I might raise is that Charters is rather biased in her selections; I would have liked to have heard equally from the apparently conservative majority of Americans who voted Nixon into office as much as from the radical Left who opposed him; I would have liked to have read something in support of the Vietnam War and against Civil Rights just as much as the many writings which argue vociferously from the opposite position. It would have made for a more balanced read, I believe.

Have only had time to browse through this book and would love to read it, but alas have no time to sit and read but do have plenty of time in the car driving. LONGING for this and oh so many other titles to be on audio! I pray.

Charters collection emphasizes literary and cultural dimensions of the 60's. The result is a distortion, by omission, of the grittier, on the ground challenges to corporate/government power. Where are our GI's who mutinied, our sailors who sabotaged and took out our aircraft carriers, the Bobby Seale and Huey Newton trials, the mass protests at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, 1968, the mass ghetto rebellions and much else?