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Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s. By Howard Brick. (New York: Twayne,1998. xx, 242 pp. $33.00, ISBN 0-8057-9080-2.)
Howard Brick has performed an important service and produced a remarkable book. Too often, our recollections of the 1960s are segregated into distinct categories. One is devoted to the turmoil in the streets, the student movement, and antiwar activity. The other conjures up hippie-oriented images of peace, love, and the Grateful Dead. In neither of these areas does intellectual life seem to matter much. What Brick has done is to remind us of just how important ideas were in the 1960s and, equally important, to illustrate how these various threads of 1960s life-the political, the social, and the intellectual-all wound in and out of one another.
In the brief space of...