The Sixties: The Decade Remembered Now, by the People who Lived it Then [V0005]

1976 oversized PB (14x10.5-inch) with cover wear and clean text pages. A Rolling Stone history of the 1960s, full of black & white photographs, posters, stills, memorabilia, and original essays by John Dean, Nora Ephron, Eugene McCarthy, Gloria Steinem, Andrew Young, and others - to make up a retrospective view of the tumultuous decade. For content, see the photo of the BACK.

One of the very few Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Long out of print, this is a majestic, ambitious, freewheeling account of what it was like to live through the 1960s, told in the form of essays from everyone from Hugh Romney (Wavy Gravy) to David Eisenhower to Nora Ephron to Francis Gary Powers. Highly pictorial, this was in the same form-factor and has often been confused with the red-cover "Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock'n'Roll," which came out about the same time. They are not the same.

These are highly personal essays, from David Eisenhower's essay about growing up around his grandfather, President Dwight David Eisenhower (PS: "Camp David" was named for him), to Francis Gary Powers' talk about being shot down and used as a pawn in the Cold War, to the folk music scene in Greenwich Village to 1962, to the assassination of Medgar Evers and the rise of the militant civil rights movement, to the famous "Daisy" ad used by the Lyndon Johnson campaign in 1964, to essays from several schoolchildren and college students about their memories of the day John Kennedy was killed in November, 1963, and stretching into essays by Nora Ephron about The Pill, talks about pop music, the dawn of rock festivals, Woodstock, Altamont, and the end of the 1960s.

For those of you who didn't grow up during that decade, this will be jarring: the depiction of the 1960s you grew up with, maybe in the 1980s or 1990s, had very little to do with what actually happened back then. This was written in the early 1970s with the people who lived the 1960s.

There are gaps. Remember, this was written in the 1970s, before the American public could know the extent of surveillance of the "counterculture." We didn't know, back then, the immense failure of US foreign policy in Southeast Asia, though we suspected it. Robert McNamara's admission of this failure came many years later. Nor does this book attempt to address the downfall of the second Nixon Administration, though there's an essay from Tricia Nixon.

Ultimately, any attempt to address an entire decade of history, let alone one as volatile and personal at the 1960s, will be deemed by some to fall short. As an historical record, this will be valued -- and justifiably so -- for years to come."