Book Review

The Sixties by Arthur Marwick Oxford University Press 1998

A book review for Sammie and any other Sixties nuts.

Basically this is a must have book, for anyone interested in that period known as the Sixties. It provides a sound structure and a holistic view for interpreting events. The period covered is what Marwick called "the long Sixties" (1958 to 1974), although certainly in the UK, the Sixties as a period of change and upheaval never really kicked off until around 1963. It forms a good antidote to the drug-induced recollections of celebrities that have also found their way onto the market.

What Marwick attempts to do was is to defend the period as a time of a huge revolution in living standards, relationships and attitudes, while rejecting the "dogmatic tosh" in which some radical Sixties activists believed (usually well after the event). The "counter-culture" and the "bourgeois system" were he claims never really in dialectical opposition to one another. Rather, there was a subtle interchange between them, with many innovations being absorbed into the mainstream and some counter-culture icons displaying an extraordinary flair for capitalism. The "revolutionary consequences" that Marwick singled out were not those of the Marxists, but were manifested in "the music of the Beatles, the fashion of Mary Quant, the art of Andy Warhol".

Framing the sixties as a period stretching from 1958 to 1974, Arthur Marwick argues that this long decade ushered in nothing less than a cultural revolution--one that raged most clearly in the United States, Britain, France, and Italy. Writing with wit and verve, he recaptures the events and movements that shaped our lives: the rise of a youth subculture across the West; the impact of post Beat novels and New Wave cinema; the sit ins and marches of the civil rights movement; Britain's surprising rise to leadership in fashion and music; the emerging storm over Vietnam; the Paris student rising of 1968; the new concern for poverty; the growing force of feminism and the gay rights movement; and much more. As Marwick unfolds his vivid narrative, he illuminates this remarkable era--both its origins and its impact. He concludes that it was a time that saw great leaps forward in the arts, in civil rights, and in many other areas of society and politics. But the decade also left deep divisions still felt today.

Where the book does fall down is that it was written by an academic historian. It frequently fails to capture, the spirit of excitement and anticipation that characterised the period, where people thought the future really was up for grabs. Generally speaking, historians only get published if they challenge what everyone knows and to do this they often unwittingly apply their own academic distortion..