****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This book is a must-read for anyone who lived through these fabled and troubled times and is willing to endure Witcover's often emotional and always gripping recreation of the events of that fateful year. For those of us who were involved and are nostalgic about the people, hopes, and aspirations we remember from those times, it is difficult to resist peeking between the covers of any book written by Jules Witcover, a well-noted journalist and author who was on-the-scene as a national correspondent as the cataclysmic events of the sixties in general (and 1968 in particular) transpired. Although it was sometimes personally painful to re-experience by way of Witcover's Technicolor prose style about events that I either participated in or was acutely associated with, it is also humbling and encouraging to discover the degree to which he has accomplished this effort with such terrific accuracy, verve, and perspective.Too often today one reads neo-conservative revisionist accounts of the sixties written by bow-tied authors who were likely so busy squeezing prepubescent pimples in the boys' room mirror of their local junior high schools in 1968 to really have understood what was going on or what it meant. Thus, they write essays simple-mindedly equating 50s style bohemianism with the beliefs, lifestyles, and perspectives of the counterculture, or promulgate the erroneous notion that the sixties youth revolution was a simple coda of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, or that it's the aftermath of the so-called "new-left" cult of permissiveness that is primarily responsible for the breakdown in contemporary American culture. Such silly, superficial & self-serving analysts of the sixties social scene would do well to immerse themselves in tomes such as this to gain a better sense of the times before launching into ignorant and self-serving diatribes.The sixties defy such easy, unsophisticated, and facile explanations, and it is difficult to now faithfully recollect the various individual elements of those fractious times without a quite careful, deliberate, & objective search. Many of the conditions for better understanding are present in this book. Witcover describes the month-by-month progress of the year with excruciating detail and a unique sense for how to mix various seemingly unrelated events and characteristics of a particular moment to engender the faithful recall of its tone and flavor. He slowly & carefully recreates the stage for our understanding of how the social, economic, and political sensitivities of millions of Americans with different perspectives & beliefs collided into cultural conflict, and how the collective hopes & dreams of many Americans for a better nation were nearly destroyed beneath a flood of violence, deception and trauma associated with the events of the year.1968 was a year of great pitch and moment for this country, a moment in time when the social fabric of the country was nearly torn apart, and it was indeed a tragic year in the sense that so much of what started out as positive, hopeful, and energetic ended as being negative, discouraging, and dissolving. It was, as Charles Dickens observed about a different revolutionary period, "the best of times and the worst of times", it was a time when, for even the briefest of moments, the social, economic and human possibilities of this country hung in the balance, when a certain indescribable electricity hung in the air, and when we thought we might just be able to turn this troubled and troubling world around. Then it crashed back to earth. Jules Witcover describes this year of such hope and despair as well as I have read to date. Read it and enjoy!
