Charles Kaiser's 1968 in America is widely recognized as one of the best historical accounts of the 1960s. This book devotes equal attention to the personal and the political - and speaks with authority about such diverse figures as Bob Dylan, Eugene McCarthy, Janis Joplin, and Lyndon Johnson.
This is the story of what happened to America in 1968, the most turbulent twelve months of the postwar period and one of the most disturbing intervals we have lived through since the Civil War. In this century only the Depression, Pearl Harbor, and the Holocaust have punctured the national psyche as deeply as the dramas of this single year. Nineteen sixty-eight was the pivotal year of the sixties: the moment when all of a nation's impulses toward violence, idealism, diversity, and disorder peaked to produce the greatest possible hope-and the worst imaginable despair. For many of us who came of age in that remarkable era, it has been twenty years since we have lived with such intensity. That is one of the main reasons why the sixties retain their extraordinary power over every-one old enough to remember them.
