Customer Reviews

Sixties people

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I first picked this book up in search of some information about Woodstock. After a thorough cover-to-cover reading of this book, I would gladly say that this is a winner. Humorous, engaging, fascinating, it's worth picking up and skimming, if not actually sitting down to read it. A fun read, with lots of little-known information about the 60s and the people of that decade. A must for anybody interested in the 60s.

I lived through the Sixties (on the younger end) and have read many many books on the subject. This is far and away the best book introduction to the cultural aspects of the 60s. Particularly valuable is the broad focus -- this is not just another re-hash (as it were) of the hippy stereotype. The book talks about hippies and their more political brethren the "freaks," but it also includes chapters on early 60s types -- surfers, party animals, and the folks with big hair and leather jackets who bought (and inspired) all those girl group records.

Highly recommended both for those who were there and those who weren't. It's entertainingly written too, and has lots of great pictures. Not a replacement for more serious scholarly tomes if you want to go in that direction later, but it's a great map of the territory.

For about half of this book, the authors do a good job of explaining some of the subgroups of the 1960s: surfers, "folkniks," etc. The book tells you more than you want to know, perhaps, about things like creating a beehive hairdo, but until the last three chapters, it is fair minded and dispassionate about the strengths and weaknesses of various subcultures.

When the 1960s became the '60s, however, the authors leave all sense of fairness and accuracy behind. They are overly harsh on the hippies and drip with contempt for "Mr. and Mrs. Average," the bewildered Americans trying to make sense of it all. The biggest problem with the "Mr. and Mrs. Average" subgroup, however, is that it isn't a subgroup at all and actually comprised a large number of cultural subgroups who have nothing in common with each other.

But the authors really drop the ball when they talk about the "Rebels." To hear them tell it, the Black Panther were just making a fashion statement and they were inexplicably hounded by the police. Most of the Panthers were felons and at those "children's breakfasts" which the authors praise, the Panthers distributed coloring books to six year olds explaining how to kill "pigs."

The authors say that the Weather Underground never killed anyone but themselves, in an accidental bombing in Greenwich Village (not bothering to mention that that bomb, a very powerful one, was intended to blow up a dance hall near Fort Dix attended by a bunch of 18 year old draftees and their high school sweethearts. There were lots of people killed by the Weather Underground: a mathematics grad student in Madison, Wisconsin, police and armored car guards in upstate New York and so on. If the authors linger over the deaths of every "rebel" killed by the police, they owe it to their readers to indicate that it wasn't just because the "pigs" had a problem with their clothing.

You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the authors blow.