Book Review

Canada and the United States

Howard Brick offers this volume as the latest contribution to the Twayne Series on American Thought and Culture. The 1960s may already have generated more studies than any decade in American history, and now Brick joins Morris Dickstein, Todd Gitlin, James Miller, Stewart Burns, Terry Anderson, James Farrell, and others in bringing the period under examination. From the textbooks to the televison media, and even in the academic literature, the 1960s registers emphatic images. The Vietnam War and the protests against it, the continuing civil rights movement and the turn to "Black Power," the manifestations of a "counterculture," the resurgence of the modern feminist movement: all perpetuate this decade in vivid memory.

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In a work that focuses on formal ideas and artistic trends, Brick has chosen not to consider the decade in terms of such expected subjects as the New Left, or black nationalism, or feminism. Instead, he has organized his chapters by conceptual themes that distribute these items throughout the book and bring them into discussion with many related subjects. Thus we have such categories as "Knowledge and Ideology," "Development and Its Discontents," "Authenticity and Artifice," "Community and Mass Society," and "Systems and the Distrust of Order." Brick gains considerable strategic advantage and insights by this reordering. To be sure, it often requires him to shoehorn some subjects into these categories, as in his discussion of authenticity in jazz, and an awkward inclusiveness sometimes emerges. But the topical arrangement has the useful effect of connecting 1960s discourse to a larger continuum in the twentieth century, making the decade less the singular radical moment by which some would like to remember it.

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