Sunday, March 21, 2010

Major Project Progress

I am trying to delve through the piles of post-it notes on my desk at the moment in order to structure a possible draft in the next two weeks. However, I feel as though my research is not complete and I am waiting on "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage" By Todd Gitlin and more particularly "The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade"by Gerard De Groot, a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews. De Groot offers a post-modern revisionist view of the 60s and is closely aligned with my own views at this point. As publishers weekly explain, "The commonly accepted history of the decade, DeGroot insists, is a collection of beliefs zealously guarded by those keen to protect something sacred. In the end, DeGroot envisions the '60s as a trivial period of self-indulgence on the part of the West and a bitterly tragic 10 years as they played out in other theaters (especially the Middle East and Southeast Asia). DeGroot deconstructs virtually all key icons of the era—Woodstock (a festival, yes; a nation, no), the Beatles, Dylan, student radicals, Haight-Ashbury, the sexual revolution and even Muhammad Ali—finding that their legends loom far larger than their realities. One might disagree, but DeGroot's book comprises a fascinating revisionist polemic. "
I am very excited to begin my readings of these texts and eagerly await their arrival... hopefully amazon delivers soon!

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