Almost all of my books have been historical novels, but this one is the one most dear to me, an attempt to understand the fault line that the Vietnam War laid across American society, leaving almost every man of my generation with scars physical or psychic. My picks are all books that illuminate the multiple upheavals of that time.
This is a classic account of the rebellious souls of the counterculture who attempted to disentangle themselves from a society they found stifling and parasitic.
Coyoteās memoir is sometimes bleak, sometimes funny, almost always endearing even through the worst of unintended consequences.
A brutally and beautifully written picture of a time that sought to remake America for the better.
In his energetic, funny, and intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the countercultureāa journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self-imposed poverty of the West Coast communal movement known as The Diggers. With this innovative collective of artist-anarchists who had assumed as their task nothing less than the re-creation of the nationās political and social soul, Coyote and his companions soon became power players.
In prose both graphic and unsentimental, Coyote reveals theā¦
Winter Soldiers offers firsthand accounts of more than thirty of members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, some of whom first joined the military with a deep belief in the rightness of Americaās role in that conflict.
Eventually they made common cause with the protesters against the war and their voices had a role in its ending. Winter Soldiersfollows them from their lives before the war, through their service, and into its aftermath.
In 1971, Vietnam veterans testified in public hearings about atrocities they had participated in or witnessed during the war. Here, Stacewicz seeks to tell their story by interviewing more than 30 members of Vietnam Veterans Against War and draws on their archives for supporting evidence.
This is a personal story of Carole and her rise from the ashes of tragedy as a fourteen year old, to success in many areas of her life. Carole graphically depicts the story of how success is the result of a passion and determination that comes from deep inside
...and a hard rain fell is a devastating firsthand portrait of a young man brutalized by the war from basic training to his final discharge and the nightmares that followed.
John Ketwigās memoir pulls no punches in an account of his experience that is as eloquent as it is horrifying.
If you want to know what an ordinary soldierās life was like, from basic training to the jungles and the recurring nightmares, this is the book.
A classic, must-read Vietnam war memoir The classic Vietnam war memoir, ...and a hard rain fell is the unforgettable story of a veteran's rage and the unflinching portrait of a young soldier's odyssey from the roads of upstate New York to the jungles of Vietnam. Updated for its 20th anniversary with a new afterword on the Iraq War and its parallels to Vietnam, John Ketwig's message is as relevant today as it was twenty years ago. "A magnetic, bloody, moving, and worm's-eye view of soldiering in Vietnam, an account that is from the first page to last a wound thatā¦
The societal changes brought by the movements of the sixties had a different effect on women.
The sexual revolution promised freedom but didnāt plan for jealousy or conflicting ideas of āfree.ā The anti-war movement and even the civil rights movement saw womenās role as making the sandwiches and lettering the placards.
Rosen chronicles womenās rising fed-up-ness from the 1950s to the unfinished business left at the bookās publication in 2000.
In this enthralling narrative-the first of its kind-historian and journalist Ruth Rosen chronicles the history of the American women's movement from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present. Interweaving the personal with the political, she vividly evokes the events and people who participated in our era's most far-reaching social revolution. Rosen's fresh look at the recent past reveals fascinating but little-known information including how the FBI hired hundreds of women to infiltrate the movement. Using extensive archival research and interviews, Rosen challenges readers to understand the impact of the women's movement and toā¦
War is coming to the Pacific. The Japanese will come south within days, seeking to seize the oil- and mineral-rich islands of the Dutch East Indies. Directly astride their path to conquest lie the Philippines, at that time an American protectorate.
Two brothers, Jack and Charlie Davis, are part ofā¦
If there is any cultural icon that defines this era, it is music.
Positively 4thStreetchronicles the personal and musical lives of these four, a portrait of extravagant, quarrelsome genius and the transformation of folk music from academic song-collecting to an era-defining musical form, by way of Greenwich Village, the anti-war movement, and shifting personal entanglements.
When twenty-five-year-old Bob Dylan wrecked his motorcycle near Woodstock in 1966 and dropped out of the public eye, he was already recognized as a genius, a youth idol with an acid wit and a barbwire throat; and Greenwich Village, where he first made his mark, was unquestionably the center of youth culture.
In Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu recounts the emergence of folk music from cult practice to popular and enduring art form as the story of a colorful foursome: not only Dylan but also his part-time lover Joan Baez -- the first voice of the new generation; her sisterā¦
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. Itās 1967 and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war. Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he doesnāt think that, in the shadow of Vietnam, the Cold War, and atomic bomb drills, there is going to be one. Ellen is determined to have a plan, because nothing else seems capable of keeping the world from tilting. And the Ghost, who isnāt exactly dead, just wants to go home to a place that wonāt let him in, the small California town where they all grew up.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didnāt matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Courtās overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over womenās reproductive rights placesā¦
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today