Customer Reviews

The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I find myself in general agreement with the five-star review above. The book reads like a collection of similiarly themed essays loosely edited into a book-length format. This is not a complaint, rather a observation because the format lends itself to being enjoyed in short bits and pieces while travelling or in other similiar situations where a long uninterrupted read is impossible.
Despite the book's lack of a continous narrative it does convey one clear message. While concervative's still rant about the sixties' liberals, feminists, secularists, etc., the conservatives 'won'. That win extended far beyond the US. In France, W. Germany, Mexico and in the Soviet Bloc, the forces of the status quo were victorious. Yes, there were partial victories by the forces of change--in the US civil rights, in France and W. Germany educational reform--but the right in every political system won. The scarey thing is that the liberals/progressives know they lost but the right does not know that it won.

A previous reviewer said this book is strictly negative, and that's partly true.
The reason it has such a negative feel is because it attacks many sacred cows that we've come to associate with '60s history: Camelot, Woodstock, Haight-Ashbury, the moon landing, et al.
Nothing is "all good" or "all bad," and if there's any decade in the 20th century that seems to organize itself in that way, in retrospect, it's the '60s.
I would recommend this book most for people who have followed analysis of '60s history for a while and seek a few grains of salt. But I could also recommend it as a Sixties 101 along with "Boom" by Tom Brokaw -- both as generalized starting points.

This book should be required high school/college reading.There is an old saying, 'everything you know is wrong'.That is the 60's in a nutshell.Anyone who thinks this book is some kind of 'rightwing backlash' just has'nt read it.Right and Left take their lumps.Yes Vietnam was a mess,but the VietCong and NVA were brutal thugs.The Cultural Revolution was a bloodbath and Che was an idiot.The students revolution in Mexico was a noble failure,the students revolution in France was a farce.The Counter Culture was awash in mysogeny and class hatreds.The 60's were,in most part, a mess.The real heroes were too often shoved aside,the idealists devoured by their comrads.The generation that feared 'selling out', sold out.This is a rambling book,not a short read at all.But worth it.Give a copy to your professor.

A well-crafted compendium of the notable events and people of the Sixties. Arranged as self-contained vignettes, it reads like a short story anthology. Writing is crisp and insightful, with an abundance of tongue-in-cheek humor. Sets out to debunk many of the popular but mythical historical viewpoints of the decade and add clarity and analysis to much that seems inexplicable, and achieves these aims. Also discusses many international events and people to avoid making this a U.S.-only story. Includes appropriate background from earlier decades as well as projection into future years, for historical context. This is history at its best.

De Groot has neatly debunked the often-uncritical views left and right take when declaiming on the Sixties. While he's clearly glad the shindig is over, I---in contrast to many who did not like this book---do not detect a serious sense of gladness that the right won (and indeed it did.) Rather, I see a muted cautionary tale. Still, I think De Groot clearly disdains the counter-culture more than it deserves to be. To read this book, you'd think group sex and the attendant pressure on women to make themselves available started during the Acid Tests. They didn't and De Groot should have known better, just as he should have known better to give space to someone like Robin Morgan to tell us just why men don't deserve women.
All in all, a good, though not great read.

There are certain periods of history that don't receive the attention they deserve, and others that are examined more than is necessary. The 1960's is one of the former, for although it was indeed a turbulent time, particularly in the United States, it consisted of such a jumble of historic events (Vietnam, the hippies, the Cold War, Civil Rights, et al) that it is difficult to find a central theme or point of view or focus. As a result histories of this era are few and far between.

The other difficulty with histories of recent times is that they are a part of the living memory of the author. Since the 1960's was the decade in which the contemporary political scism between right and left first burst into full form, many of the books about it tend, consciously or unconsciously, to be slanted or edited in order to support the point of view of the author, socially or politically, rendering them little more than political diatribes in support of the author's beliefs.

"The Sixties Unplugged" manages to capture a sense and feel of the decade while generally presenting a balanced recounting of the various events and aspects of life in America as it actually was. Written in the form of short examinations of individual happenings or cultural conditions as they came into being or underwent significant development, it covers a wide range of the events from society, culture, the economy, politics, the arts and geo-political relations. While occasionally judgemental about certain events and issues, it nevertheless takes pains to present a balanced view of each topic and frequently provides information usually not considered or outlined which can have an impact on the conclusions one draws about that event.

This volume, coupled with the David Halberstam history "The Fifties", cover those two under examined decades to provide a good general overview of what life was really like, what it felt like to exist in that time and provide a general overall image of the times. While it won't allow anyone to consider themselves fully versent regarding the period, it at least can help tie together many of the bits and pieces of where the world in which we live today first developed. For that alone it is well worth reading.

I'm always suspicious of any history book social or otherwise that is almost completely positive or negative. "History" just don't happen that way! This is a very unbalanced work. Woodstock is good example to cite. There are many others but Woodstock will do. According to the author Woodstock amounted to nothing more than a rainy, muddy mess apparently enjoyed by no one. Members of the band The Who are quoted stating what a terrible ripoff gig it was and apparently they hated every minute of it. Fine, but of all the musicians that took part they were the ONLY musicians quoted. I don't recall any individual that just attended being quoted. Too much is made of the concert as some sort of mass movement that was supposed to accomplished something. While some might have thought about it that way I'm sure the great majority of people that attended didn't. They were there to have a good time and most likely did. Everyone I know who attended did. This is the problem with the entire book. It's all about mass movements that failed or famous individuals who were "not what we thought they were" and nothing at all is written about how the decade effected people as individuals other than the leaders of the failed mass movements. So,of course, the whole decade is written off and just a colossal mess.
I lived through the sixties. I never demonstrated for any cause, I didn't serve in Vietnam, I never campaigned for any candidate, and I didn't attend any big Rock concerts. But the Sixties is almost entirely responsible for forming my outlook and preception on life. It was much more than just living and maturing for ten years. It was the Sixties. My feelings about myself, and how I feel about any important issue today is just about the same as it was in 1970. The decade had a very profound positive effect on me personally and I sure I'm not the only one.
This book isn't entirely without value but there is truth beyond fact and the reader would do well to keep that in mind!

Just how good were the sixties?
The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade"
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A criticism of the sixties which compares the highflown ideals of the time to what was accomplished and finds the decade lacking in results. The author finds that the civil rights movement was the best thing about the sixties and the one movement that, for a while, had a consonance between its goals and its actions to realize those goals. However, that movement quickly followed the path of the other movements that were supposed to fix the world. It became corrupt and veered far from its original intent.
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> The author praises Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King, as individuals who wanted change and reform and some practical idea of how to attain them. Otherwise he finds little to admire in the decade. At times, he seems to be saying that from the beginning it was obvious that most of the aims of the sixties could not be realized and that all of the agitation and demonstration and rule breaking was a waste of time and an exercise in stupidity. At other times, he faults people who wanted change for not staying on course and instead going in for self indulgence and pointless rule breaking. If the radicals had behaved better, they would have succeeded more, he feels.
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> He sees the sixties as a time when liberalism went into decline, a debatable point. To many it seems that the radicals gained much of what they wanted. Some feel that the sixties succeeded only too well, causing a great deal of destruction, crime, drug use, divorce, out of wedlock births, and overall alienation and misery. The author complains that the sixties have been unfairly scapegoated as causing crime, the present plight of family, and moral decay. But at other times, he seems to say, yes, the sixties did bring about all that.
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> All in all, a fascinating, often amusing, informative, and instructive work that educates those who were not around then and those that were, and that probably reminds many of things they forgot.
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> The author finds that the high ideals that supposedly motivated many did not exist. What did exist was egotism and boredom, self indulgence and self conceit, giving rise to a rebellion for the sake of it, vandalism and crime for the fun of it, tyranny, and disorder. Instead of organizing to effect change that would benefit, people wasted time in stupid and destructive actions. He takes a hard look at the privileged youth who sought revolution for revolution's sake. One of the funniest parts of the books is the quotation by then hippie Peter Coyote that perhaps, just perhaps, structure, order, and discipline are somewhat necessary to society. He belatedly realized that no goals can be realized, no achievements are possible, without those qualities.
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> The most scathing critiques are reserved for white middle class radicals who attacked the entire culture of the US and the west with the intent of destroying its legitimacy in the eyes of the populace. To an amazing extent they succeeded, which is why today for many citizens the minute they hear "America" or "western civilization" they sneer. Unthinkable that anything is good about the place or the culture. Yet the radicals had nothing to put in the place of what was destroyed except more radicalism.
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> We have the Weathermen member, Bill Ayers, setting off bombs and exhorting people to kill their parents, Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn terrorizing people on a plane for the fun of it and boasting about "scaring the (scatological expletive) out of (expletive for white people) America," Dohrn praising the Manson murders in public forums, describing how after the murders, the murderers sat down and ate dinner, and how cool was that, and exulting how the murderers struck a glorious blow against America. The group developed a signal consisting of forked fingers to show how Manson stuck his victims or stuck his fork into their food. The group also had the Smash Monogamy campaign forcing everyone in the group to have sex with all and any members of the group that wanted him or her. Group members tried to avoid encountering another member that they had no interest in having sex with.
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> We have the evolution of civil rights and equality movement into the radical black movement, the anti white and anti American movement, the black panthers who engaged in crime such as drug dealing and murder and the sharp and sudden increase in crime in the black community far above what it had been before the sixties.
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> We have the saga of baseball player Curt Flood, who resisted being traded, and who compared his contractual obligations to the team to the civil rights struggles and who sued to be released from his contract. At the time of his suit, Flood was making $100,000 a year making him one of the highest paid people in the US. Flood lost but ultimately his case led to players becoming free agents that were no longer owned in perpetuity by the team, the result being that teams competed for athletes who could then command hundreds of millions of dollars. A few decades later A Rod got a $252 million contract. According to the author, Flood, who was black and who was compared to Rosa Parks and Dred Scott, opened the floodgates to what the author sees as obscenely overpaid athletes. The author is struck by strangeness of equating the well paid athlete with slaves and civil rights workers who risked life and limb to be treated decently.
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> We have events abroad, including how the atrocities of communists were ignored by the western media. The book takes a hard look at the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China. The revolution was meant to totally change the Chinese culture into the new revolutionary communism culture that would perfect the world. To totally cleanse by ridding the world of everyone that bore the old culture in their minds was the aim. That meant killing many tens of millions of people, such as teachers, older people, educated people, and anyone thought to harbor "bad" ideas or reactionary values, and even included cannibalism. Ordinary people massacred other ordinary people. Students beat their teachers to death. Children informed on their parents.
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> We have the famous picture of the Viet Cong guerilla being shot in the head which has stood for decades as an example of the evil of the American side of the war. The author points out something that surely all the journalists must have known but kept quiet about, that the guerilla had just murdered the aide of the man that shot him, and the aide's wife and children.
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> The author finds that the sixties was the selfish decade, when social harmony was abandoned in favor of factionalized goals. It brought flowers, music, love and good times, hatred, murder, greed, dangerous drugs, promiscuity and STDs at previously unknown levels, ethnic cleansing, a warped sense of equality, a bizarre notion of freedom.
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I bought two copies of this book for friends of mine who are totally into the 60's. This book is ANTI-60's... not for the run of the mill flower-child... The first page i flipped to, said how there were no significant musical advansments in the 60's... HELLO???????? hendrix, janis, morrison????

Of yeah the right wing won all the battles, they crushed the sixties revolt and ruled Amerika for
the next 40 years, but they lost the war of values and they know it. Now with the events of the
economic collapse its clear they have now lost the economy for at least a generation. The right did
succeed in destroying the young hippie left of the sixties but their sacrifice and martyrdom just
looks more heroic with every passing day, thats why the facts don't matter. Good night Professor.