Review of THE SHATTERING: America in the 1960s
A great history of The Sixties has finally arrived - and just in time
While racing through this gripping narrative of that still highly controversial decade, the Sixties, I wished I was still teaching American History. This would be required reading. Dear reader … this is required reading for anyone seeking perspective on these troubling days and years. Boyle is a terrific writer with a Halberstam touch both with the anecdote and the use of historical detail. His thesis is that the Sixties was the “shattering” that set-up the good and the bad of our world today. In other means, we have been here before and, in fact, the Sixties may have been worse. This is history at its most enlightening. While “the more things change the more things stay the same” motif is way too facile a description of this brilliant book, it touches on the nagging worry I felt as I read it. Why do we not allow the past to inform our present and reassure us with its historical familiarity as we navigate our current problems and fears?
There are so many things in this book that jump out and slap you in the face. It reveals how much the Sixties have been commercialized and distorted in our collective memory with the music, hippies, assassinations, black power, and sexual revolutions too often reduced to t-shirts and playlists. In The Shattering, Boyle lifts the actual hood of that decade. What do we see? A very conservative nation that might have elected Goldwater in ’64 if JFK had not been shot. A nation that gave Wallace 16% of the vote in ’68 after he won primaries in both ’64 and ’68 in America’s “heartland”. A nation that never reached a clear majority against the Vietnam War, Tet and My Lai aside. A nation disgusted with protests and fed up with any more efforts at racial equality. While the good were shot, the fact is that the reforms and the civil rights of LBJ’s Great Society were propelled by JFK’s assassination … and JFK did “steal” the 1960 election! The bottom line is that so much has changed and much of the change was profound and radical; however, those epic changes triggered a response we are living with to this day. Maybe you are now picking up why I needed to teach this book as I am beginning to ramble. Buy it.
The Shattering: America in the 1960s
Kevin Boyle
2021 440 pages (including notes)