cover image Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the '60s

Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the '60s

Philip D. Beidler. University of Georgia Press, $24.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-8203-1641-3

The political activism and social change of the 1960s were generated in part, according to Beidler, by the books published and read widely by students during that decade. Beidler, a professor of English at the University of Alabama, cogently critiques '60s writers whose books challenged entrenched ideas of race, class and gender, such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. Also represented are '60s theorists (Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown); antiwar novelists (Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller); and cultural revolutionaries (Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary). Beidler argues that the period was the last time a generation of Americans would respond so dramatically to the printed word; future cultural discourse, he maintains, will be dominated by audio-visual and electronic communication. (Nov.)