The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade

by Gerard De Groot (Author)

• Used

  Unabridged
  2009

  $5.90

  The 1960s is a decade often seen through a rose-tinted lens: an era when the young would not only rule the world but change it, too, for the better. But does such fond nostalgia really stand up? Vivid, rich in anecdote, sometimes angry and always persuasive, The Sixties Unplugged is a hugely entertaining and authoritative account of the decade of myth and madness. Read it and remember that even if you weren't there, you can still find out what really happened.

  'A fabulous history of the decade that lacks the usual nostalgia. Gerard DeGroot explores the period with all its horrors from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to the failure of the super powers in the Six-Day War. He does catalogue the free love and flower power festivals but in sharp contrast to the ethnic cleansing in Jakarta and the real threat of nuclear war. This is a really important book to put perspective on such a formative decade and remove some of the romance.' The Bookseller

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $38.59

  'If you remember the Sixties', quipped Robin Williams, 'you weren't there'. That was, of course, an oblique reference to the mind-bending drugs that clouded perception - yet time has proven an equally effective hallucinogen. This book revisits the Sixties we forgot or somehow failed to witness. In a kaleidoscopic global tour of the decade, Gerard DeGroot reminds us that the Ballad of the Green Beret outsold Give Peace a Chance , that the Students for a Democratic Society were outnumbered by Young Americans for Freedom, that revolution was always a pipe dream, and that the Sixties belong to Reagan and de Gaulle more than to Kennedy and Dubcek. The Sixties Unplugged shows how opportunity was squandered, and why nostalgia for the decade has obscured sordidness and futility. DeGroot returns us to a time in which idealism, tolerance, and creativity gave way to cynicism, chauvinism, and materialism. He presents the Sixties as a drama acted out on stages around the world, a theater of the absurd in which China's Cultural Revolution proved to be the worst atrocity of the twentieth century, the Six-Day War a disaster for every nation in the Middle East, and a million slaughtered Indonesians martyrs to greed. The Sixties Unplugged restores to an era the prevalent disorder and inconvenient truths that longing, wistfulness, and distance have obscured. In an impressionistic journey through a tumultuous decade, DeGroot offers an object lesson in the distortions nostalgia can create as it strives to impose order on memory and value on mayhem.