ABSTRACT
The structure of The Sixties is itself a reflection of the eclecticism of the decade. Sometimes with great success and other times with less, Gitlin combines personal narrative of events a sense of larger social history to describe events that he did not personally experience. Perhaps the most refreshing and courageous aspect of the The Sixties is the author's awareness of what Paul Hollander called the political pilgrim: a syndrome in which "marijuana-smoking Americans" are feted by "ascetic Asian revolutionaries". Gitlin understands that the "extraordinary impression" made upon visitors to North Vietnam by American radicals was well orchestrated to gain political ends and to hide the social and economic blemishes of a totalitarian regime. Gitlin has some understandable trouble with this paradox, reconciling America as a civilization with a specific episode in American history that was less than glorious. This is after all a book on a decade, not a treatise on normative political theory.
