The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History Of A Disorderly Decade

by Gerard De Groot (Author)

• Used

  Unabridged
  2008

  $3.44

  In this compelling book, Gerard DeGroot overturns the generally held belief that the sixties was a time of peace, love and understanding, of power to the people, freedom and new dawns. In fact, as he reveals, the decade was as much marked by mindless mayhem, shallow commercialism and unbridled cruelty as it was by wearing flowers in your hair and embracing your fellow man. How many of us, reflecting on those times, think about Sharpeville, the Gaza Strip, Vatican II, Biafra, Jakarta or the Cultural Revolution? Far from being a decade of opening doors, DeGroot argues convincingly that it was, rather, a decade in which they were slammed firmly shut, in which revolution was never on the cards, a time where chauvinism and cynicism got the better of hope and tolerance. Thought-provoking, persuasive and never less than entertaining, De Groot offers readers the Sixties unplugged, free of the amplifiers and filters that blur our memories and muddy our ability to see the past clearly.

• 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.