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The Sixties.- Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974. By Arthur Marwick. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xx, 903 pp. $39-95, ISBN 0-19-210022-X.)
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.
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,...