Making Peace With the 60s (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "SEGREGATION, sensible people in the South and elsewhere insisted at midcentury, would not yield to demonstrations or to court decrees..." (more)
Key Phrases: United States, Soviet Union, New Deal (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For Burner, "the history of the 1960s is the history of the breaking apart of the liberal mentality," particularly with reference to the two intersecting mass actions of the decade, the civil rights and anti-war movements. To understand that breakup, Burner "examines forces of the era that might have been allies but succeeded in becoming enemies: a civil rights movement that severed into integrationist and black-separatist; a social left and a mainline liberalism that lost a common vocabulary even for arguing with each other; an anti-war activism that divided between advocates of peace and advocates of totalitarian Hanoi."

Burner's strength is his unflinching willingness to draw the continuities in such developments, even as it pains him to do so. Where more reverential histories try to parse out the bad from the good, Burner shows how the two were intimately, if not always necessarily, related. With considerable success, he charts how a civil rights movement stressing the content of character melded into the radical chic of black separatism and armed insurrection and how liberals prosecuted a "progressive" war on poverty at home while simultaneously waging a "reactionary" war in Vietnam.

. . . Burner's own left-liberalism allows for--perhaps creates--blind spots. Throughout Making Peace with the 60s, he draws no distinction between public and private spheres and consistently conflates government action with society as a whole. In an epilogue, he romanticizes the New Deal as a time of national purpose, "a sense of a wider community," and laments the lack of such national coherence now. While such tics are bothersome, they make the book all the more convincing. Even as Burner laments the demise of big government liberalism, Making Peace with the 60s painstakingly details where and why things went wrong.

From Publishers Weekly

Burner, a professor of history at SUNY, Stonybrook, offers a new look at the impact of the tumultuous '60s. Burner's masterful retelling of the civil rights movement rekindles the excitement of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and others who risked so much. Following this, however, the inclusiveness of the movement was undermined by black separatists in Nation of Islam and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). "The black power ethos," he says, "strives to encrust black Americans into a single mass, and whites into another." The lasting contribution of the Republicans, who followed the Democrats into power, was a skewing of the traditional work ethic into "Don't tax my tax dollars to relieve my neighbor's poverty." With clearheaded expertise, Burner also pieces together the cultural mosaic of the '60s. Although his section on John Kennedy recycles much of the now familiar foibles and high-minded fortunes of JFK's White House, his treatment of writers gives real credence to the idea of literature leading to and shaping the era. Jack Kerouac's On the Road ("a road map for the sixties"), Gary Synder's Zen input of righting the relationship of self to the world, and other intellectual artifacts helped create a movement counter to Establishment materialism. Burner offers a keen-sighted, comprehensive analysis of a fascinating era that produced the Flower Children and Richard Nixon. Readers searching for an admirable explanation of the cross-connections in this mythic decade can find them here.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (August 5, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691026602
• ISBN-13: 978-0691026602
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,271,607 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great one-volume overview of a turbulent decade., January 11, 2000

By	Marc E. Sterling (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Making Peace with the 60s (Paperback)

As a child of the 60's, I've read a lot of books about the period trying to pin down just what happened... Mr. Burner's book is the best one I've read about the period. His concise summaries of the civil rights and black power movements are wonderful for anyone trying to get a handle on the era. What a shame that a decade that started out so promising fell apart so quickly. I gained a lot of insight on the 60's through Mr. Burner's book.