The Sixties - Years of Hope, Days of Rage by Todd Gitlin - Book Report/Review Example

voice to the dormant feelings that the parents had to repress in order to have what they needed on the outside to impress – the two car garage, the big car, the house in the suburbs – “and yet children also live out potential that lie dormant in their parents” (Gitlin, 1987, p. 17). If the parents had the internal bubbling cauldron of rage about having to conform, while turning a blind eye to those less advantaged, and turning a blind eye to the injustices perpetrated on minorities and women, the children gave voice to those dormant feelings.

If the parents had a fear that the world could end at any minute, yet felt paralyzed to do anything about it because the terror of the previous war was too fresh in their minds, the children could address this fear. Thus, the children became a vehicle to give voice to their parents’ inner despair that was necessarily repressed, and this is the reason why the decade was so volatile and such an agent of change. It was through this catalyst that the New Left movement was born. The rest of the book essentially carries on with the underlying thesis, which is that the New Left, borne from the ashes of the 1950s, was the catalyst for change in the decade, using examples of how this catalyst spurred change throughout the 1960s.

The author himself was at the forefront of the movement, and, like a modern-day Candide, was able to provide an eyewitness account to many of the big events of the 1960s. The author was the prototype for the New Left movement - intellectual, fascinated by scholars, philosophers and authors from Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka and Camus, attending Harvard and meeting and falling in love with a daughter of communists. On campus, he was witness to early sit-ins for the civil rights movement; anti-nuclear.

The researcher discusses the book that is presenting the catalyst, in which the New Left movement was born. The book discussed in the essay carries on with the underlying thesis, which is that the New Left, borne from the ashes of the 1950s, was the catalyst for change in the decade, using examples of how this catalyst spurred change throughout the 1960s. The author himself was at the forefront of the movement, and, like a modern-day Candide, was able to provide an eyewitness account to many of the big events of the 1960s.

The author was the prototype for the New Left movement - intellectual, fascinated by scholars, philosophers and authors from Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka and Camus, attending Harvard and meeting and falling in love with a daughter of communists. On campus, he was witness to early sit-ins for the civil rights movement; anti-nuclear protests; pacifist demonstrations; and demonstrations against the Soviet Union. The author was also chairman of an on-campus peace group called Tocsin, so he cemented his vision with activism of his own.

He was also a member of Students for a Democratic Society, which protested against the Vietnam War, while the author himself protested against Apartheid. He participated in anti-war demonstrations in Berkeley in 1967, the pivotal year for this movement. The researcher then concluds his tusy and states that this is a book that the researcher would recommend to others, as it gives a very detailed account of the forces that shaped a generation.