The Sixties : Years of Hope, Days of Rage

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Summary: The New Left from Inside by Not a Searching Account
Review:



The Sixties is a vivid account of a turbulent era by one of the leaders of the "New Left" who played an important role in the anti-war movement. The book's qualities and flaws both flow from the author's knowledge that Gitlen has of many pivotal events and personalities that give the bok its intimacy but also lead him to hold the leaders of the New Left less culpable for some of the negative aspects of the era than a writer with a broader perspective might. In general, Gitlin portrays much of the radicalism of the anti-war movement and the New Left as a loss of innocence rather than a dedicated plan to accomplish the goals of the Old Left - "participatory democracy" or radical egalitarianism drawn from Marx while distancing themselves from Stalinism and identification with the Soviet Union. Gitlin covers the origina of the New Left, the Civil Rights movement and the development of Black radicalism, the growth of the women's movement and the sexual revolution, the joining of the radical left and the counterculture and the collision of these elements with the "silent majority" of more conservative Americans that made the era so tumultuous.



Rating:
Summary: I beg to differ
Review: (...) Do the words "prison project" mean anyth Gitlin was on the frontlines of the fight to liberate the youth of America from the horrendous policies of a government run by homicidal maniacs. Viva la Revolucion!

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Summary: Brilliant Account of 60's Student Movement
Review: A rare constellation of virtues made it hard to put down this riveting volume. First of all, Gitlin is a superb writer. His language often reaches a literary quality, he has a novelist's eye for detail, an investigative journalist's command of the relevant information, and a story-teller's ability with narrative. That Gitlin is an academic sociologist shows through in his capable analyses of social forces. His description of the dynamics of escalation in the student movement's activities together with its own self-understanding is especially enlightening. His account is also impressively fair-minded. Because he cared so much about achieving the goals of the student movement, Gitlin describes what was thought and done both sympathetically and critically. These and other reasons make the book well worth reading for anyone interested in U.S. culture. But for those of us who were involved in the campus struggles against the war in Nicaragua or against investment in apartheid South Africa in the '80's or, indeed, in any such campaigns since, this book creates a debt of gratitude.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Account of 60's Student Movement
Review: A rare constellation of virtues made it hard to put down this riveting volume. First of all, Gitlin is a superb writer. His language often reaches a literary quality, he has a novelist's eye for detail, an investigative journalist's command of the relevant information, and a story-teller's ability with narrative. That Gitlin is an academic sociologist shows through in his capable analyses of social forces. His description of the dynamics of escalation in the student movement's activities together with its own self-understanding is especially enlightening. His account is also impressively fair-minded. Because he cared so much about achieving the goals of the student movement, Gitlin describes what was thought and done both sympathetically and critically. These and other reasons make the book well worth reading for anyone interested in U.S. culture. But for those of us who were involved in the campus struggles against the war in Nicaragua or against investment in apartheid South Africa in the '80's or, indeed, in any such campaigns since, this book creates a debt of gratitude.

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Summary: None too brilliant, to be sure....
Review: Gitlin's a light-weight when it comes to cultural theory, and whatever his position in the early 60's 'counter-culture', he has little to say that makes one see the present in a new or more vivid light. A smooth, passive writer, he has little to say that makes a reader question any of their assumptions about the decade discussed, or even question what followed. And why so conservative now? How could he be reviewed as 'Marxist' or 'post modernist? Even neo-conservatives like Camille Paglia are more interesting on the sixties. Surely the decade deserves more scrutiny than this. As a feminist I can recall far more in the way of patriarchal attitudes than Gitlin writes about, and he doesn't seem to have tried as many drugs as he might either....

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Summary: Gitlan sets the standard
Review: In Gitlan's "Years of Hope, Days of Rage" Todd Gitlan set the standard for analysis of the Sixties and the Sixties Generation. His view, though from the perspective of an SDS leader, speaks to a much broader audience, and generates the first book of its kind on the movement era generation.
A seminal work of classic dimenstions, Gitlan captures the essance and essentials of what it meant to grow up in the Sixites. The life and times, the fever and excitement. He does himself a disservice though in not broadening the discussion to race relations which engineered the velocity of the movement and determined its cutting edge.
Timothy Fitzgerald

Rating:
Summary: Gitlan sets the standard
Review: In Gitlan's "Years of Hope, Days of Rage" Todd Gitlan set the standard for analysis of the Sixties and the Sixties Generation. His view, though from the perspective of an SDS leader, speaks to a much broader audience, and generates the first book of its kind on the movement era generation.
A seminal work of classic dimenstions, Gitlan captures the essance and essentials of what it meant to grow up in the Sixites. The life and times, the fever and excitement. He does himself a disservice though in not broadening the discussion to race relations which engineered the velocity of the movement and determined its cutting edge.
Timothy Fitzgerald

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Summary: Useful, but not to be regarded as an introductory text
Review: In writings about the 1960s in the US, Gitlin offers the reader a rare combination of both the perspective of a major player in the New Left at that time, and as an astude political commentator in his own right. There are, however, deficiencies in regarding the text as a good academic history of the period, as other reviewers have noted.

My particular research, and reason for reading this book, relates to the demise of SDS, and in discussing this, Gitlin frequently talks in greater detail about personalities rather than abstract, but vital, political fact. Indeed, on several occasions the author goes as far as to declare his personal dislike for several of the Weatherman leaders on the grounds of their political differences. Certainly not the stuff of academic surveys.

Perhaps best taken and used as a well-written and historically precarious yet valuable biography, rather than as some kind of definitive text of the 60s. Contains full notes and index, but no bibliographic essay.

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Summary: A magical return to my youth
Review: Mr. Gitlin's position as head of SDS in the 60's puts him in a unique position to write a cultural history of those turbulent times. As a college student in the late Sixties, reading this text took me back to the days of protests, love-ins and the best music ever recorded. Quite simply I found it a moving, magical, refreshing experience.

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Summary: needs perspective
Review: One review says this book is "Part critical history, part personal memoir, part celebration, and part meditation." This is accurate - though some parts are larger than others. The critical history is very interesting - but the personal memoir, which dominates the book, is not. Gitlin has a lot of interesting and incisive things to say, but he dwells far too much on boring minutiae like who Tom Hayden's girlfriend was in different months.