The Shattering: America in the 1960s

by Kevin Boyle

On July 4, 1961, the rising middle-class families of a Chicago neighborhood gathered before their flag-bedecked houses, a confident vision of the American Dream. That vision was shattered over the following decade, its inequities at home and arrogance abroad challenged by powerful civil rights and antiwar movements. Assassinations, social violence, and the blowback of a “silent majority” shredded the American fabric.

Covering the late 1950s through the early 1970s, The Shattering focuses on the period’s fierce conflicts over race, sex, and war. The civil rights movement develops from the grassroots activism of Montgomery and the sit-ins, through the violence of Birmingham and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the frustrations of King’s Chicago campaign, a rising Black nationalism, and the Nixon-era politics of busing and the Supreme Court. The Vietnam war unfolds as Cold War policy, high-stakes politics buffeted by powerful popular movements, and searing in-country experience. Americans’ challenges to government regulation of sexuality yield landmark decisions on privacy rights, gay rights, contraception, and abortion.

Kevin Boyle captures the inspiring and brutal events of this passionate time with a remarkable empathy that restores the humanity of those making this history. Often they are everyday people like Elizabeth Eckford, enduring a hostile crowd outside her newly integrated high school in Little Rock, or Estelle Griswold, welcoming her arrest for dispensing birth control information in a Connecticut town. Political leaders also emerge in revealing detail: we track Richard Nixon’s inheritances from Eisenhower and his debt to George Wallace, who forged a message of racism mixed with blue-collar grievance that Nixon imported into Republicanism.

The Shattering illuminates currents that still run through our politics. It is a history for our times.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Politics, American, Race, Historical

480 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 2021

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The United States In The 1960s

In the third chapter of "The Shattering" (2021), Kevin Boyle's history of the tumultuous 1960s, the concept of the "Beloved Community" receives considerable attention and, in fact, constitutes the chapter's title. While exploring the Civil Rights Movement during the late 1950s -- early 1960s, Boyle discusses the nature of the Beloved Community. He quotes civil rights activist James Lawson as saying "Love is the force by which God binds man to himself and man to man." (p. 103) Lawson said that with uncompromising love, the Civil Rights movement wouldn't just redeem America's soul but would also create on American soil the Beloved Community. (p. 104) Boyle then discusses John Lewis's expansion of the nature of the Beloved Community. (p. 104). Lewis had said:

"According to this concept all human existence has strived toward community, toward community together. Wherever it is interrupted or delayed by forces that would resist it -- by evil or hatred, by greed, by the lust for power, by the need for revenge -- believers in the Beloved Community insist that it is the moral responsibility of men and women with soul force, people of goodwill, to respond and to struggle nonviolently against the forces that stand between a society and the harmony it naturally seeks."

Civil Rights leaders expanded the concept of the Beloved Community from American philosophers and social thinkers earlier in the 20th Century, including Josiah Royce among others. While the term does not appear frequently in Boyle's book, it constitutes a foil to the title of his study "The Shattering: America in the 1960s" in the history it has to tell.

The 1960s and the decade's many components have received a great deal of scholarly and popular attention. In his Preface, Boyle uses the term "shattering" to describe the break-down of what often is seen as consensus politics. compromise, and a sense of national unity in the United States prior to the events of that decade, spurred on, in many accounts, by the nation's young people. Boyle does not entirely agree with the portrayal of consensus politics in America. Rather, he sees the events of the 1960s as arising in substantial part from issues and fissures in the earlier United States that were not far, if at all, below the surface and that needed to be addressed. "Even at its mid-fifties peak", Boyle writes, that political order was a fragile arrangement, its boundaries repeatedly tested and occasionally broken. In the first half of the 1960s they were fully breached." (pp. xxiii -- xiv).

Thus Boyle, while recognizing the end of consensus politics, emphasizes as well the continuity of the 1960s with prior events in America. His book contextualizes the decade by brief looks at the years following WW II, including the rise of the Cold War, the Truman presidency, domestic unrest, and the Korean War, among other things. Although many types of shattering took place in the 1960s, Boyle probably wisely focuses on three intertwined histories: the Civil Rights struggle waged by African Americans, the anti-war movement centering upon the Vietnam War, and the extent, if any, of the government's right to regulate its citizens' sexual behavior. These three histories provide more than ample material for a book about the 1960s while still leaving much unsaid.

Boyle's history combines the broad, large themes mentioned above with many stories and anecdotes about individuals. This is a valuable approach to take. As Boyle points out: "History isn't shaped by structures alone, though, no matter how powerful they may be. Individual actions matter too, as do the complex mix of experiences, beliefs, and emotions that lie behind them." (p.xv) Thus in his study, Boyle devotes a great deal of attention to a small working class family, the Cahills, in Chicago and to its history and neighborhood. The book opens with the family organizing a neighborhood display of the American flag in 1961 in celebration of the Fourth of July. Boyle delves into the family's immigrant history and explores how the family fared and changed as the 1960s ran their course. He goes on about the Cahills a great deal, making the book meander in places, but on balance his discussion brings a human, particular perspective to his broad history. So too, while exploring the large events of the era and figures such as the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, Boyle weaves in discussions of individuals, some well-known, some less so.

The book also tends to move between subject matter and chronology in its organization. Some chapters begin, for example, in the middle of a story and then work back. Other chapters begin with a discussion of the Vietnam War, for example, and then shift to a discussion of contemporaneous events in Civil Rights, in gender issues, or student protests. Again, it is valuable to see the inter-relationship of the events of the 1960s, even at the cost of a collage-like presentation on occasion.

I was intrigued by Boyle's discussion of the Nixon presidency. He sees Nixon as trying to reinvent himself to bring back what many people then thought of as the peaceful, largely consensus days of the Eisenhower presidency of the 1950s. Boyle, as noted earlier, finds the 1950s rather less than admirable. Still, I wondered whether the problem was more in Nixon himself rather than in the days and policies of his former presidential mentor. Boyle finds much of the 1960s as a time of protest justified by the injustices of the America of the time. Again, I did not find it necessary to agree with Boyle's opinions in their entirety to benefit from his book.

Boyle is a Professor of American History at Northwestern University and received a National Book Award for his "Arc of Justice" (2003) about a 1920's trial in Detroit helping to precipitate the Civil Rights Movement. As were many readers of "The Shattering", I was in high school and college during the 1960s. I learned from Boyle's book even while it brought back memories and made me sad. The divisions of that time persist in the current United States. My wish is for our dear country to come together, resolve its differences and wounds in a spirit of patriotism and in the direction of the ideal of the Beloved Community discussed in Boyle's book and in the course of this review.

Robin Friedman

[Bruce Katz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very impressive and, I think, useful look at the enormous changes that took place in the US between the late 50s and very early 70s — and that are still tearing at the country today. Boyle never explicitly names what was "shattered" in this period, but he doesn't have to: it was America itself and what the words "America" and "American" meant to the people who lived then.

The book opens on July 4, 1961, when two friends decide they will drape their entire block with American flags in glorious celebration of the holiday. The next day's newspaper ran a photo of the neighborhood folks, all smiling brightly, deeply proud of what they had done, what the flags signified to them. To get at this point -- what the flag meant to them -- Boyle tells us a little about one of the neighborhood couples, using them as stand-ins for a particular kind of America: the years after World War 2, how they got to that neighborhood, what it meant to buy a house, their first car, raise a family, work in a booming economy, live in a Catholic neighborhood. The Russians had the Bomb, of course, but over all things were pretty secure for this couple and others like them. God, mother, apple pie, the flag, growing wages, TV sets and a national highway. Not quite the America of "Father Knows Best" (which is not mentioned in the book) or other such shows, but pretty close. White America.

Boyle will return, to good effect, to this couple at the end of the book. But in between these two visits is where the real story is. This, the heart of the book, is where we witness the difficult birthing of a new America. Boyle shows us a country increasingly at war with itself. The optimism and confidence of the postwar, the trust in government and institutions, that starts to break down in response to numerous stressors. He delineates the fault lines that were forming... or becoming, finally, visible after decades of being there unremarked. The Cold War, Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare, Eisenhower calm and competent in the White House. And then the ground began to shift: the beginnings of rock and roll (banished from Chicago's Catholic schools in 1957) and the immoral gyrations of that strangely named boy from Tennessee; the Beatniks and Allen Ginzberg; the Pill and debates over contraception and a woman's place. A new, aggressive political Right eager to reclaim the party they believe Eisenhower had taken from them. Increasingly vocal and visible demands by Black Americans for equal rights, equal citizenship, and the violent pushback those demands elicited. A country on the other side of the world few people had ever heard about -- Vietnam.

And then the 60s, and it all started to break open.

For readers of a certain age — which is to say, I suppose, my age — the book will definitely stir memories. But Boyle isn’t after stroll down memory lane for Boomers, and he's certainly not looking at the period through rose-tinted glasses. His book shows how the country began to break apart over race and war, drugs and sex, music and women’s rights -- sometimes separate sometimes intertwined. As I read “The Shattering,” I found myself seeing the decade very differently than I had as one who had lived it through high school and college. Sure, I remembered most of those people and events, but not with the perspective and clarity that the passage of many years provides. This time I was struck by how violent the decade was: the astonishingly brutal suppression of civil rights and anti-war activists, the riots and assassinations. Hundreds of thousands of people coming together to demonstrate, to urge action. Reading the details of men, women, and children being struck by high pressure fire hoses... seeing the hate-contorted faces of people screaming obscenities at youngsters just trying to go to school... the lies told about Vietnam, a war that decision-makers knew from the start couldn't be won, and said as much off-stage -- it has an awful effect. It’s a sobering story, all the more so for being familiar. The book moves briskly but Boyle takes his time laying out what led to this or that policy, event, movement. Introducing us to the "key" people and how they interacted and influenced, for good or ill, one another: John and Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, George Wallace, Richard Daley, and countless others, some political actors, others acting on a different stage.

And through it all — things I remembered, things I misremembered, things I never knew — I found myself shaken: not only by the countless explosions (political, cultural, and literal) that marked the period but by the realization that the angry fissures we see in America today are pretty much the same as the ones fought over then: Abortion. Voting rights. Media. Gender. Increasing political activism among evangelicals. Poverty. Arguments about what the Constitution does and doesn’t allow. Who is a "real" American. Reading about what happened then gives us insight into what is happening now.

At one point, Boyle cites a Harris poll taken days after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. The poll asked Americans whether they thought “something was deeply wrong” with the country. Two-thirds said they did. But that perception didn’t lead them to the politics [Martin Luther] King and [Bobby] Kennedy had preached. When Harris asked them to define the nation’s problems they didn’t talk about inequality, injustice, the weight of the war, or the plight of the poor but about violence, lawlessness, and the breakdown of social order, which they attributed by overwhelming margins to radicals, racial agitators, common criminals, and madmen with guns. Within a month [arch-segregationist] George Wallace had moved up another two points in the polls, to 16 percent, the increase driven largely by his support outside the South, which had more than doubled in the weeks since RFK’s murder.

With little editing, the same paragraph could be written about today. As Mark Twain never said, though people often say he did, history may not repeat itself but it often rhymes. Indeed.

There were times, as I read “The Shattering,” that what I felt most was sadness -- and, if I am to be honest, anger -- that we’re fighting the exact same battles again, with the very same people in opposing camps. At other times, though, I felt a measure of reassurance because America made it through those earlier battles: scarred, shaken, altered, but still standing.

I still find myself going back and forth between those feelings, depending on the day.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Shattering provides a history of the 1960s with particular emphasis on the era’s central struggles: racial justice, the Vietnam War and reproductive freedom. Though the subtitle references the 60s, the chronology that’s covered includes plenty of history from the 50s through the 80s.

This is a history with which I was familiar having lived through it myself. This book reminded me of much that I had forgotten and also provided details that were new to me. Twentieth century readers will be able to see traces of the roots of polarization that foreshadows the politics of today.

The narrative of this book is focused on the serious issues of the time, however the grass roots perspective is brought to life through occasional noting of individual human interest stories. The book begins with one of these stories by elaborating on the life of a particular family living in the “bungalow belt” on Chicago’s northwest side. That family is revisited sporadically as the book’s narrative progresses through the second half of the twentieth century.

A couple of other individual highlights that I recall from the this book are the stories of Norma McCorvey (a.k.a Jane Roe of Roe vs. Wade) and Allison Krause (one of the Kent State shooting victims). These individual highlights provided obscure details that were new to me, and I think captured my particular interest because they added a human nuance to the bigger more widely known news stories.

I had mixed feelings about the title “Shattering.” It seemed to connote a negative image of something good that had been broken. But much of that brokenness represented improvements to the lives of a portion of society that previously had been unfairly disadvantaged. The first third of the book focuses on the 1950s and the fragility of the postwar political and social order, which rested on racial segregation, the Cold War expansion of the military, and sexual repression. Those were things that needed to be shattered.

However, there are the painful lessons learned from the Vietnam War which conjure other versions of shattering. It’s almost unbearable to look back at that war and realize how unnecessary all those casualties and deaths were. It seems to be a lesson that requires relearning at about twenty year intervals.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kevin Boyle is a top tier historian and a very good writer, so I was anticipating this book when I saw it announced. I wound up slightly disappointed, but the reasons probably have as much to do with my own approach to the topic--I'm writing a book that would from the surface to be fairly similar--as with what Boyle did. The Shattering is much more about the (at times, very) long Sixties than the decade itself. We're almost a hundred pages in before we get to anything like the center of the story if you think of that as covering the ten years with a 196X as their designation. He dives very deeply into the forces that shape the decade, and at times--as with the story of the immigrant family in northwest Chicago--it's not entirely clear that the detail on the 1920s-1950s adds enough to be worth the page count. But it plays to Boyles' narrative strengths and I was fine reading it. The second major choice he made was to center on three primary narrative threads--civil rights (which he knows very well), cold war politics leading into Vietnam, and the controversies around sexuality and reproductive rights. Nothing wrong with the choices, but it requires leaving an awful lot out, some of which--as with the relationship between the Third World and civil rights--is crucial to the stories he chooses. It also means sidelining the cultural currents--music especially--which weren't footnotes. He's much less sure of that turf, witness his statement that the Beatles early audiences were teenyboppers and that the hip people didn't respond. If that was ever true, it was only for about 15 minutes, and I'd argue it was never really the case. And he totally misses the importance of the girls groups--see Susan Douglas's Where the Girls Are for the reasons. The absence of, for example, Bob Dylan and James Brown from the discussion says a lot. Still, the book does what it sets out to do pretty well.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1960s were certainly an eventful decade, and Boyle manages to pack a lot of different personalities, incidents, issues and movements into this narrative history covering the period from the late 50s to early 70s. For all the interesting content, though, structurally this book was a bit of a mess - seemed like the author couldn't decide whether to structure it chronologically or topically and ended up with a mishmash of both.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was good but it just didn't feel all that necessary, especially after other 1960s books.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Shattering is a fast-paced, fairly high level history of the 60's written in a lively journalistic style, even though the author is an academic historian, not a journalist. It juggles three main story lines: the civil rights movement and its offshoots; Cold War foreign policy, especially as it played out in the Vietnam War and the streets of America; and cultural battles over sexual politics (abortion, birth control, gay rights).

The frequent shifts from one story line to another could have been jerky and disorienting, but Boyle does a good job of weaving them together with clever segues and commentary pointing out connections between events and people. And like a good college lecturer, which I imagine he is in his day job, he has a knack for drawing his audience's attention to the major underlying currents and ultimate significance behind events that might otherwise seem a disjointed jumble of facts.

To take just one example that I found especially interesting given more recent history, he covers at some length the landmark Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut. In its immediate aftermath, few people saw its significance. Estelle Griswold, the executive director of the Connecticut branch of Planned Parenthood, challenged her state's law prohibiting birth control. Most states had already eliminated such laws, and Connecticut was no longer enforcing its ban, so what was the big deal? In deciding the case, the court's liberals hammered out a theory that found a sweeping "right to privacy" in the constitution, not explicitly mentioned in the text, but logically inferred from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th amendments. This newly discovered constitutional right would eventually become the basis for overturning a raft of other laws on the way to establishing a host of other constitutional rights, including those to abortion, interracial marriage, and gay marriage. Hence the concern of some experts that now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, some of those other rights, all based on the right to privacy created by Griswold, might be at risk too.

There were a couple of little nits that bothered me just enough to deduct one star. The book opens with a framing device involving a couple of families in Chicago who organize the residents of their street to put out flags every July 4th—until they don't. We get a lot of background on one of these families, which led me to expect their story to intersect in some dramatic way with one or more of the historical themes of the book. It didn't. Other than occasional brief updates on their lives and a perfunctory farewell, they just sort of faded away. And secondly, for some reason, Boyle often refers to significant historical figures—not main characters, but apparently those of minor importance for his purposes—without giving their names, just their titles or other generic identifiers. Possibly his thought was to name only main characters so as not to clutter his readers' minds with the identities of secondary ones. But for my purposes, it was just an irritant. I had to figure out who they were and write all their names in the margins. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Overall though, a very solid, informative, and often gripping book.

[Brandon Westlake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boyle's book is a great narrative history, combining well-known figures and lesser known ordinary people. Its prose is simply great; this is the type of history that needs to be written to appeal to wider, popular audiences. There is a depth of exploration without being too esoteric, as well.

I commend Boyle for challenging the typical historiography of the "long 1960s"- he hints on a point that I think is critical, and yet overlooked. By positing 1968 as the bookend of the 1960s, the decade takes on a new interpretation. Historians have grown to see Nixon's resignation as the end of a long struggle, but what if his presidency is more symbolic and the consequence of the fracturing that had already been set up earlier? I think Boyle is on to something important here, and historians should take note. Nixon is an embodiment of the disillusion of the 1970s, an outgrowth of the arguments of the 1960s, that culminate in his election in 1968. Boyle treats that year as it should be.

Furthermore, while he does leave some important stories out (women, natives) we see how particular themes shape the 1960s. Politics, and foreign policy in particular, is based around the Vietnam War. Nixon tries to change this during his administration. Race relations also change beginning in 1968. Is it any coincidence that the heroic civil rights movement is typically seen as finished with MLK's assassination? There is again a shift.

Boyle navigates what happens from the late 1950s through 1968 in a very readable way, but one that paints a broad picture of a society trying to grapple with a lot of change and questions about identity, whether that be racial or about America's identity in a global sense. Readers who want to try and make sense of what might be termed the "short 1960s" should start here

[CD · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first take on this book is to skip this one for most readers who want good information on the turbulent 1960's in the United States. It isn't bad, but not very good except in concept.

That the U.S. complacency about itself in the rosy, golden era of a Post WWII world of the USA was indeed 'Shattered' during this decade is a good start. The roots of the American implosion ran deep. Author Boyle certainly acknowledges this but in doing so his timeline skips back and forth too frequently into the depths of US politics and world events in other decades. There is a bit of liberal dragging of the presumed activities of those who weren't part of the New World that JFK envisioned.

The anecdotal approach that could have worked well gets wasted after the family and their flags that start the book. An excerpt or two take from news reports about such tragic events as Kent State don't even meet the historical survey level of value in this writing. Taking the middle road view of Martin Luther King while balanced, misses the mark on the importance of what had started in the 50's with King's work. And of course Henry Kissinger can be dismissed in one sentence as evil personified.

America may have been shattered long before the Sixties by a vast inventory of changes and ideas. This book sort of ties together some events while ignoring many others of greater importance. Or at least of importance now that a half century of reflection and research has happened.

Don't start with this as an overview of the 1960's in the USA. It will leave contrails in your mind of not totally relevant events if not just things that are wrong.

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

My in-laws got me this, which makes me feel very seen and loved because it hits most of my interests.

A pretty straight shooting retelling of the 60s through Great Figure lenses surrounding civil rights, Vietnam, and reproductive rights. You can tell Boyle LOVED Nixonland.

This is most useful for realizing how deeply popular Vietnam was with the general public. I think about how our cultural retrospect is all about some sloppily fantasized real-time realization of a culture-wide rejection of Nam, but then I realize that’s probably just because the tastemakers of the latter half of the 20th century were coming out of that tradition, and that watergate probably spoiled the whole thing.

Also useful to think about the 60s as “atrocity and complicity,” as Boyle says. Copy pasted from a text I sent a friend, excuse the text speak: To go back to our earlier conversation, 60s = atrocity and complicity—viewing the atrocities through mass media and hyper speed communication of words and images, turning that atrocity over onto oneself as an individual actor that chooses to be complicit in a nation’s actions or not—there is no being subsumed into the nation, instead you are defined as an agent of your own individual choice, dis/avowal, association, more and more metered into how you consume and produce information (high literacy into visual media)—therefore, we have not moved on from the 60s. I maintain the sort of nationalist populist, irrational illiberalism moves now begin to move away from it.

[Tatiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was basically exactly what I was looking for, a place to see all the disparate threads of the time period crash into each other, because they're almost never talked about together in the same breath. Somehow Stonewall is divorced from Vietnam which is divorced from the Black Panthers which is divorced from birth control which is divorced from the economy etc, etc, like they all happened in completely different time periods. Vietnam was the subject I probably knew the least about coming into this book and was surprised to learn about the Cambodia of it all. I love deep dives, but somehow in the general conversation around the 60's it has seemed that there is almost too much to talk about so it all has to be learned in pieces.

And so what I like about this book is also my criticism, which is that because it is trying to tie everything together (as I imagine it's going to be hard to tie together the strings of 2015-2025) Boyle sometimes gives only breadcrumbs instead information. Or implies things, people and places instead of naming them outright ("NYC's celebrity mayor"), which is fine if you've read at least some of the books on his exhaustive source list, but if you don't have a pre-existing deep knowledge of events you will get a little lost.

[Laura Lea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can I give this more than 5 stars? This should become part of required reading for all young adults, as it will be required for my two young boys when the time is right.

As a child of the 80's there is so much about the intimate details of what occurred in the 60's that I was not familiar with. In school it was taught in a more general sense. Kevin Boyle brought this time to life in his narrative, giving names and personal stories. This moving piece of non-fiction is beautifully written... a true must read.

Thank you to Norton and Co publishing for my ARC. All my opinions are freely my own and I was not paid for this review.

[Sarah W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This history of the 1960s is ambitious in scope - tracing the political and social shifts that decade saw. An entire book could be devoted entirely to one of the themes and events this book covers - the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War, the 1968 election, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, among others. It does give one an impression of what it was like to live through this tumultuous time. I enjoyed this book overall and appreciate this examination of a pivotal decade in American history.

[abby j · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very very good read for someone unfamiliar with the period. super thorough! definitely balances vietnam/civil rights/women and lgbtq stories in a meaningful way. loved the little bits of judgement boyle imposes.

[Becky Loader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent research and readable history of a very complex time in U.S. history.

[Virginia Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I graduated from high school in 1960. Over the next ten years, I finished college, got my master's degree in library science, got married, started my career, and had two children. Kevin Boyle documents the shattering events in the world during those years -- civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and changing attitudes and policies about sexuality, including contraception and abortion -- that helped to form the adult woman I became. What a time it was!

[Mike (HistoryBuff) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good overview of the Sixties. It was an eye opener for me. As they say, what you don’t learn in school could make another world. I have read articles, watched documentaries and read excerpts in textbooks, but this book gave me insight in to just how much turmoil our country was in during the sixties and a good part of the seventies. I knew about the subject matter, but the information on the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam and Nixon made me hungry for more on the Sixties. Highly recommended.

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Given that I grew up in the 1960s, I can't say there was a whole lot new here, although living through a tumultuous period isn't the same as reading about it. In any case, this comprehensive review brought back memories I didn't even know I had.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boyle's treatment of the decade is certainly engaging but I would certainly not call it exhaustive. I suggest that it is by turns very interesting and hopelessly exasperating. He starts, I think erroneously, by tracing roots of the era back to FDR and the New Deal but which I would say are far more clearly rooted 2-300 years earlier in The Enlightenment and the thought that man has all the answers. The liberties in which the Founding Fathers put a great deal of stock become buried in the libertinism of hippies of the '60s.

[Ed Bernard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A moderately interesting interpretation of the sixties, well-written but also a bit overstuffed. It felt like one of those biographies of someone who does extraordinary things as an adult, but the author feels compelled to go back to his or her grandparents. The first third or so of the book is about the 40s and 50s, which I guess is important in understanding the sixties, but then why stop there? Go back to the founding of the nation, if context is so important. Or, perhaps weave it into the main narrative. Anyway, once that is out of the way, Boyle determines that the key elements that drove the sixties were the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam and the sexual revolution (mostly centered around abortion but also including a bit of gay rights and birth control). This is where the book shines and he does a great job of combining well-traveled territory with some original ideas. He also uses a framing device of a working class family in Chicago, which I thought mostly failed — the family just isn’t all that interesting and can’t be thought of as truly representative. The books wouldn’t have suffered in the least if they were not included. So, maybe 30-40% of this book is unfocused, off-topic and overstuffed — the rest of it was great. It was an easy listen so it never became either annoying or boring, but I think it would’ve been much better if it were more carefully (and wisely) edited.

Grade: B

[Len Boselovic · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boyle curiously -- but mostly tediously -- spends 40 pages introducing us to the Cahill family as if he's going to document The Shattering through their eyes. But the clan is nowhere to be found in his rambling, disjointed account of a story that is too big for him to tell. The Cahills briefly surface at the end of the reader's ordeal, where we randomly are told the patriarch consistently voted Democratic. Take it from this child of the '60s: there are plenty of better histories of the period. Give several of them a read rather than slogging through The Shattering.

[Gary Schroeder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think most people are fascinated by the time period in which they were born--or the period just slightly before--because they were there and technically part of it, but have no memory of it. It's certainly the case with me. Born in the late 1960s, I've been on the lookout for years for a really comprehensive book on the topic of the 60s and what exactly caused the shocking break from the button-down conformity of the 1950s to the absolutely-anything-goes 60s. How does such a dramatic cultural shift happen in such a short period of time? "The Shattering" does a good job of explaining it.

The short answer: none of the culture shock of the 60s was instantaneous or out of the blue. Rather, what happened in America in that decade was the release of a coiled spring that was being wound, and wound, and wound for decades, particularly in the realm of racism and segregation, perennially the topic that animates American history...as much as some Americans try to pretend that's not true. The beginning of civil rights struggles started in the 1950s; they simply reached their crescendo in the 60s. Similarly, American involvement in Vietnam started in the 1950s only reaching its bloody zenith in the 1960s.

These two issues first set races against one another and then forced a clash between the generations over issues of patriotism and the misuse of young people's lives. The fact that both music and what could be publicly said about sex dramatically changed seems a background issue resulting from these first two Prime Topics. And then, there's the radicalization of American politics and a firm wedge driven between Right and Left that echoes down to the present day. In that sense, the past of the 60s is very much alive today in its aftereffects.

Readers of The Shattering who were not aware of global events at the time will, I think, be surprised at just how violent this era was even if they know the general outline of the civil rights struggle and the efforts of the South to quash the movement. We think our present to be violent, but it's nothing compared to that era of regular beatings, bombings, murders, and political asaassinations. If I ever had notions of how "interesting" it would have been to directly experience the 60s, they were certainly dispelled by this book. It's not a time period I'd ever choose to live through as an adult.

It's not a short book and it is exhaustive, but if you're looking for a clear explanation of this timeline-altering period of history you'll find it in The Shattering.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recently, I've become incredibly interested in the events of the 1960s and just how much seemed to happen in that decade. This book seemed like a great way to get more context on that and see how it all transpired.

And it's really well written. I will admit that I was very confused and lost in the first chapter, though, which follows two seemingly unremarkable Chicagoans--Stella and Ed Cahill, who got into the newspapers in the area in 1961 for filling the street with American flags for the 4th of July celebration. The chapter mostly covered their parents' histories, their births, their struggles, and more, covering a span of about 60 years. And I was like, "What is this? Are these two more famous than I knew? Why do we care about all of this?" But as I got more into the book, I discovered this was more of a case study in to the working/middle class dynamics in a big city and how that changed over the decade.

But after that, I really got into it. It does start by focusing on events that take place just prior to the 60s, like events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50s, how the rise of Communism shaped policies involving Korea and Vietnam, the rise of the Kennedys, and more. Then it goes in to the events of the 60s, often juggling multiple events in a single chapter as they overlap, like how the hippie movement intersects with Vietnam protests or how Civil Rights intersects with what JFK and LBJ wanted to do as presidents. It was a really interesting read. I knew about most of the major events, but how they were influenced by other events or intensified by reactionary figures was a bit of a surprise.

The book actually ends around 1974, which was also good because it tied up the loose threads that just didn't quite end by the end of 1969. I liked that there were conclusions being made there.

I rather enjoyed this. It was interesting, enlightening, and written in a way that was engaging. I feel like I came out of this with a much better understanding of the 1960s and how our current country/politics reflect the trends and thinking we saw at this time. It's surprising at times just how little has changed.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Shattering is a terrific treatment of its subject matter - essential threads that make the decade of the sixties a meaty narrative. To get into this narrative, the author recaps earlier 20th century American History to define the issues (systemic racism, women's rights, cold war politics, psychedelics, economics) that eventually "shattered" America.

The presentation is highly effective in giving the reader a strong sense of what it was like to "experience" the era not as a "collage", but as a series of events, both shocking and predictable. There are wonderful stretches in the book where multiple events from all the threads followed are happening almost simultaneously, giving a unique window into what it was like to be alive on that day.

The events as presented are iconic, heartbreaking, inspiring and distressing - and the reader seems to experience them as one would at the time, but also experience them as a modern reader, with whatever perspective we have from our lives 50 years later.

Having been alive in the sixties (born in the late 62) with older siblings including a brother in Viet Nam, this book was an especially meaningful read. Hazy impressions of the assassinations, the war, the hippies, the inhumane racism, and (what I now recognize as) white male privilege now have a more solid context.

In this light, I especially appreciated the many times when the author cited contemporary polls that showed what the prevailing American sentiment was. So many times, I felt like screaming back to the people of the 60's - "What is wrong with you people!". I need to admit that my family and rural Wisconsin farming community probably felt the same as most other Americans did at the time.

There was only so much content that could be included, but I feel like the author' decisions about content were valid and consistent. A good framework to hang other 60's trends and experiences on.

A great, important read. (less)

[Ted Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This new examination of the 1960's takes on a formidable task: bringing a fresh perspective to the study of an era that has been dissected and analyzed again and again in the last half century. It begins and ends with the story of a white working class family from Chicago, whose lives, and political perspectives, were impacted tremendously by the events of that decade, and "checks in" with them from time to time to see how the major events of the decade were affecting their world. I appreciated how the author approached his study of this decade with the current trend of taking "long" view on historical eras, as he begins his analysis in the era immediately following the end of World War II and finishes in 1973, with the end of the American role in Vietnam and the issuance of the Roe v. Wade decision. While he didn't open up any new ground in his discussions of the war and the civil rights movement, the focus that he put on the Court, with decisions like Roe and a number of school desegregation cases demonstrated how central these decisions can be in shaping American life. (And finishing this book the same week that a new Court took a fresh look at the abortion controversy was timely, to say the least.) I supposed that "penalizing" the book one star for things that it left out (the American Indian Movement, a thorough look at Second Wave Feminism, the emerging consumer movement, to name a few) might be unfair, considering how much was going on during that decade. The book is thus not an exhaustive look at the 1960's, but what it sets out to do, it does very well.

[Mike Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Especially clear-eyed and lucid account of the decade that started us on the road to where our politics now reside. It's easy to see clear parallels between the folks who support Trump and those who backed Wallace.
Boyle concentrates on a few main themes -the civil rights struggle, US foreign policy and Vietnam, sexuality/reproductive rights and the politics and court decisions that surrounded them. As he makes clear in his preface, he decided to largely focus on these three and only mentions other themes, e.g. environmentalism, the women's movement, in passing.
I thought the narrative was going to center on a Chicago family, the Cahills, and what happened to them over the course of the decade. Their story is indeed somewhat representative of the arc of many families' lives in the decades leading up to the 60's and Boyle spends a lot of time explaining their background, their lives and the world in which they lived. However, after the taking of the July 4, 1961, photo of their flag -bedecked street - an effort that Ed Cahill organized and carried on for many years following - they pretty much drop out of sight except for the occasional mention. This could be Boyle's point: just like me at the time they were highly aware of events but perhaps not noticeably affected by them at the time. And like me, while they didn't join protests, flee to Canada or become hippies, the events of the 60's would color their world view for the rest of their lives.

[Arun Murali · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this recap of the 1960s. I had never heard of the 60s referred to as the Long 60s, but after reading the book, I get the idea. I was born after the 1960s, but learned about many of the critical events discussed in the book during my days as a student, both in school and in college. This is a helpful reference to learning more details about the origin of some of those events. The author carefully depicts personal stories that happen along side these events and of course covers some of the detail many may not know about each story. He weaves them in and out in chronological form.

Of particular focus are all the leaders, President and Cabinet members, elected officials, military personnel, judges, lawyers and everyday citizens. From Truman through Nixon, we understand how the events of the 60s develop and the impact they created on the early and mid parts of the next decade. For those who are more familiar with the time since then, it is helpful to see how that decade shaped so much of what we have experienced and are experiencing today.

It may seem like a history of an important decade, but a helpful dive into what took place in more detail that at least I had known prior to. I hope others will find it just as impactful.

[Joseph · Rating 2 out of 5]

I skimmed through most of this because having already read around a bit, I didn't find most of the book new or useful. Boyle takes a 10,000 foot view which ends up flattening the narrative into a Great Man theory of history. MLK did this, LBJ did that, et cetera. Analysis of the deeper forces is quite weak, and Boyle is a victim of the typical prejudices of liberal academia, branding Civil Rights protests as saintlike, conservatives as thugs, and the New Left and Black Power movements as feckless at best and criminal extremists at worst.

All this is jammed into a narrative that is written in the style of a thriller novel replete with allusions to song lyrics and literature intended to summon up the zeitgeist in just the way it is now recalled by aging boomers. This increased my irritation with the book. Those who know something of this period will find little that is new; those who know little of it will find plenty of facts that are pre-cooked to confirm the liberal prejudices they will have already picked up from high school, friends, and colleagues. Some stuff on Nixon was somewhat new to me personally though and was interesting, so I raised this rating from one to two stars.

[Adrian]

Boyle, a history teacher, shows how the post WWII accord in US politics broke down in the 1960s and 70s. This is the 'shattering' of the title. The focus of the book is US involvement in Vietnam and the battle for civil rights. There is a lot of brilliant detail especially on civil rights and how often it intersected daily with bad news from Vietnam in bedevilling the Nixon administration. I think Boyle is also keen to show how much of today's divisive political climate came from this era; challenging Supreme Court appointments, the rise of abortion and gay rights as wedge issues, the Democratic electoral loss of the south and through Vietnam how each party views patriotism. Much of this history has been dealt with elsewhere but the focus here is enlightening. There is one odd feature, Boyle introduces a Chicago family in the first chapter and one assumes the era's changes will be reflected through their experience but they are only mentioned twice more in the book.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is no shortage of books on the 1960s and it is probably the era of US History that I am most interested in. I thought Kevin Boyle did a great job in the beginning of the book in introducing a fairly typical white American family and intimating that the book would be about how we would see the "shattering" of the US consensus via the lives of that family.

However, the rest of the book was disappointing in that we rarely checked in on that family and the book turned more into a general textbook survey of the era. It did a good job of the history, but it could have used something more to differentiate it whether that was more explaining how the history affected the family mentioned in the prologue or even more explaining the shattering and how it is seen today.

All in all, Boyle did a fine job, but I would look at a book like Rick Perlstein trilogy instead.