Book Review

The Sixties is a sprawling, discursive, sometimes chatty story of cultural change in selected parts of the West during the "long Sixties," from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Organized like a multivolume travelogue, it spins out capsule histories and snapshot tales of sex, fashion, demographics, protest, consumption, and diversion across four countries. Coming at last to the end of eight-hundred-plus dense pages, the only fitting response is to balance appreciation for Arthur Marwick's many useful challenges to the parochialism of national histories and dismay at his scattershot approach and misguided assertions.

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The Sixties is not offered as a specifically cultural history, but it would have been stronger with a clear focus and some conscious limits. It attempts to answer (often by flat dismissal) all possible questions. Searching for the broadest conclusions and themes, Marwick argues that deep cultural and socioeconomic shifts ("transformations in the lives of ordinary people," as in "improved material conditions and greatly enhanced personal freedoms") are what alone distinguishes "the unique civilization of the Sixties." His guiding premise is that "political developments . . . are of relatively minor importance," so that the Cold War is literally absent from this book, the Vietnam War makes only a late appearance, and such epochal events as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis (or those in Dien Bien Phu, or Bandung, or Suez, or Algeria, or the "Prague Summer" and the 1968 Soviet intervention) do not enter into the narrative. Regarding the United States, he does not ignore the civil rights movement, of course, and in passing grants the centrality of racial politics, though the absence of scholarship on Black Power leads this author to miss its importance completely. But, like his treatment of the May 1968 events in France, or the "hot autumn" of 1969 in Italy, his coverage of the civil rights movement is an exception, really, in a book that is determinedly non- or even antipolitical.

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