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As the punning title of this book suggests, Gerard DeGroot would like to do for history what Barack Obama wants to do for politics—to lead people past the rancor and myth-making of a lightning-rod decade. If the presidential candidate insists that we ought to quit our obsession with a time when the majority of today’s voting-age Americans were either too young to consider inhaling or not yet even born, the historian insists that there was less to the battles of the age than may meet the eye. DeGroot has some intriguing credentials for the job. An American-born professor of modern history at St. Andrews in Scotland, a little older than Obama but too young to have been draftable for Vietnam, he is the gimlet-eyed author of The Bomb: A Life (2004) and The Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest (2006). He also has an unusual idea about how to address the subject of the 60’s. Resisting the “temptation to impose order,” he wants to create a “kaleidoscope” rather than a conventional narrative. In other words, he means to write history, 60’s-style.

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