Books › The age of great dreams
The age of great dreams
296 pages
A vivid, deeply researched immersion into the turbulent memories and sweeping social transformations of the American 1960s.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like stepping into the turbulent, brightly colored memories of a fractured era. The narrative maintains a steady, absorbing pace as it weaves together the grand political projects of mid-century America with the fiery ruptures of the 1960s. The mood is both vivid and contemplative, balancing the visceral imagery of revolt, tear gas, and rapture with serious, archival-backed analysis. The prose is grounded and comprehensive, drawing on oral histories to capture the human desperation and fierce ideological battles of the time. It will deeply satisfy history enthusiasts who crave a nuanced, wide-lens view of how consumerism, global superpower ambitions, and cultural upheaval collided to forge the modern American identity.
- Mood
- turbulent
- vivid
- contemplative
- Tone
- analytical
- absorbing
- reflective
- serious
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- collective memory · social upheaval · national identity · cultural transformation · political conflict
- The writing
- Absorbing and deeply researched, weaving archival evidence and oral histories into a vivid historical narrative.
- The arc
- Moves from the grand, optimistic projects of mid-century America into the fiery, chaotic ruptures of a deeply divided decade.
- Who it's for
- Readers who want a comprehensive, grounded exploration of the social and political forces that shaped the American 1960s.
Content notes
- war
- civil unrest
- drug culture
- political violence
About the book
In this absorbing new book, David Farber gives us the history of our collective and individual memories of the 1960s: the brilliant colors of revolt and rapture, of flames and raised fists, of napalm and tear gas, of people desperate to make history even as others fought fiercely to stop them. More than thirty years after the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, this book grounds our understanding of the terrible events of that era by linking them to our country's grand projects of previous decades: the forging of a national system of social provision in the New Deal; our new agenda as global superpower after World War II; the creation of the national security state; and the maturation of a national consumer-driven mass-mediated marketplace.
Farber's account, based on years of research in archives and oral histories as well as in the historical literature, deals in full not only with nation building in Vietnam, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Watts riot, and the War on Poverty, but with the entertainment business, the drug culture, and much more.
Description from Open Library.
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