Revisiting the Tumultuous Sixties at the Nichols Library 
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             One of the most popular non-fiction books since the turn of the year has been Tom Brokaw’s Boom!,  a tapestry of the sixties generation drawn from   interviews and reminiscences.  Unlike Brokaw's   elegiac The Greatest Generation, Boom! is   ambivalent. Even unreconstructed lefties feel misgivings about the era’s excesses while conservatives are downright disdainful.  Almost everyone the author interviews (among them Arlo Guthrie, Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove) describes a personal journey through the upheavals of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, and the counterculture.     Brokaw's profiles convey the decade's diverse experiences and its roiling energies.  The questions of that era; devil rights, war and peace, the loosening of social values—are central to the making of  present day America. and are playing out in this year’s elections. Definitely worth a look back.

             Another recent addition that shed’s light on the Sixties worth looking at is Clatpon! the Autbiography (available in print and CD), which gives one man’s view of a decade of intense musical explorations.  Clapton, of course, was a member of the folk-beatnik blues underground, then took flight with improvisatory trio Cream, before stumbling out of the decade with the over-hyped blind Faith.  Clapton, drawing on his diaries, gives and inside view of these explorations. He is also frank about his drug use and tangled relationships,   also reflective of the period.  His self-reckoning is filled with modesty, especially in the form of dissatisfaction with his early successes.  Also on hand at the Library is Bo Spitz’s 2006 biography of the Beatles, “the definitive story of the band that sparked a cultural revolution (Publishers Weekly).” 

            The Beatles were also featured in one of the best films of the decade, A Hard Day’s Night.  Shot in black and white, with quick cutting and a documentary feel, the film captures the headlong excitement of the group and the period.  The side bits with the groups managers, producers, and designers anticipates the deadpan absurdism of the Monty Pythons.  Other films of the decade on hand at the Nichols Library include Goldfinger (the free-lancing James Bond was an icon of 60’s cool), The Graduate (a satire on suburban mores, on loan from the Scrooge and Marley coop) and MASH.

            Interested in a taste of the literature of the sixties?  A decade that produced Updikes Rabbit trilogy, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Silvia Plyths The Bell Jar is one of note.   This reviewer’s pick for a representative title would be Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest.  The plot centers around a struggle for power in a mental ward between boisterous inmate Randle McMurphy (faking insanity to get off the prison farm) and Big Nurse, the voice of order and conformity. The struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses McMurphy’s battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned.

            Speaking of Kesey, the Library also recently added a  copy of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which follows Kesey from his days as a rising literary star at Stanford to his notoriety as an evangelist for the eye-opening immediacy of LSD. Kesey traveled the country in a bus labeled Further, provoking run-ins along with way with Stanford professors, Hell’s Angels, Unitarian ministers, the Beatles, and the anti-war movement. The acid tests, multimedia events staged to share the lysergic experience, had the dubious effect of making such experimentation a mass phenomenon.  Wolfe captures it all,  brilliantly, in his trademark irony.    

            The sixties was, of course, a tumultuous era. Richard Mahooney’s Brothers and Sons “proves that the lives and deaths of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy remain as compelling now as they were throughout the turbulent 1960s.”  The tumultuous events of the 1960s pass in review as Mahoney contrasts Jack as the cool ironist with Bobby as a vengeful authoritarian who grew, Mahoney contends, into a principled moral crusader.  In Carry Me Home, Diane Whorter gives a snapshot of the Civil Right’s Movements ”violent epicenter,”  the industrial city of Birmingham, Alabama, where voting-rights activists faced down police and Klansmen bombed a strong of churches.   McWhorter's reveals the internal power struggles within the civil rights movement, the uneasy role of Birmingham's small Jewish population, and the collusion of local with anti-black violence.  They March into Sunlight by David Marannis twines two compelling events of the Viet Name era into a compelling narrative: a tense firefight that decimated the elite Black Lions and a violent campus protest at the University of Wisconsin.  Marannis “captures the Vietnam War at home and on the battlefield as well as, if not better than, any book yet written.”  Finally, Radical Son by David Horowitz offers the point of view of one who imbibed deeply in the radical politics of the era and came to loathe them.