Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy

Debate about the 60's continues in this noisy and intelligent book of essays by nine prominent writers, including Harvey Mansfield, Walter Berns, Alan Wolfe, Anita LaFrance Allen, Randall Kennedy, Martha Minow, Martha C. Nussbaum, Jeremy Rabkin, Cass R. Sunstein, and Sheldon S. Wolin.T.V superstar George Will provides a foreword and Todd Gitlin offers an afterward. The book essays discuss the impact of the 60's in the areas of gender roles, sexuality and the family, universities and education, and racial issues.Most of the essayists are complainers about the sixties, but whether or not one agrees with them, one must admit they are skillful complainers, and perhaps more important, that the information they provide in the course of their arguements is valuable and memorable. Regardless of one's viewpoint about the sixties, this book is worth buying and reading.Essays by Harvard's Harvey C. Mansfield and the American Enterprise Institute's Walter Berns are especially well done.Mansfield's "Legacy Of The Late 60's" essay breaks the period down into twelve catagories and delivers lively "mini-essays" roughly two pages long for each catagory. Topics covered include the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, Feminism, the 60's Impact On The Family, Drugs and Crime, Environmentalism, Rock Music, Postmodern Literature and Film, the "Underclass," Education, Affirmative Action, and Egalitarianism. Mansfield socks his ideas to us in only 24 pages, and covers a lot of ground very readable and provocative form.Walter Berns discusses the impact of the 60's on Universities, and spends a major part of his essay detailing the crisis at Cornell University in New York. He indicts key players part of that crisis, students, faculty, and administrators, and offers interesting and chilling postscript information about the later successful careers, decades later, of these players.This book is worth buying and reading. It contributes importantly to our understanding of the most discussed decade of the twentieth century, the 60's.