The Sixties
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- ¥1,000
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- ¥1,000
発行者による作品情報
Many books have been written on the Sixties: tributes to music and fashion, sex, drugs and revolution. In The Sixties, Jenny Diski breaks the mould, wryly dismantling the big ideas that dominated the era - liberation, permissiveness and self-invention - to consider what she and her generation were really up to. Was it rude to refuse to have sex with someone? Did they take drugs to get by, or to see the world differently? How responsible were they for the self-interest and greed of the Eighties?
With characteristic wit and verve, Diski takes an incisive look at the radical beliefs to which her generation subscribed, little realising they were often old ideas dressed up in new forms, sometimes patterned by BIBA. She considers whether she and her peers were as serious as they thought about changing the world, if the radical sixties were funded by the baby-boomers' parents, and if the big idea shaping the Sixties was that it really felt as if it meant something to be young.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like many other members of her generation, journalist and author Diski (On Trying to Keep Still) was drifting during the 1960s: she took drugs, had sex, and spent time in mental institutions in her attempts to subvert the Establishment. Cutting through the patina of nobility, nostalgia and idealism by which most of her fellows remember the time, Diski describes a counterculture ruled by intense self-absorption, a misguided, idealist attempt at radical reform that led directly to the corruption of the '80s. Diski brings as much objectivity to bear as she can, and her British perspective keeps her a few paces removed from the conflicts over civil rights and Vietnam. Her writing is pointed, holding many (herself included) to rigorous scrutiny, a cultural deconstruction that pushes back against the generally accepted, media-friendly, and very American image of the free-love '60s. Even readers familiar with the history will find her insights absorbing and eyebrow-raising. Though her conclusion falls short of condemnation-their motives were too pure for that-Diski makes succinct, clever and meaningful arguments exposing a self-mythologizing generation and its ultimate failures of both fore- and hindsight.
