EBOOK
A Hard Rain
America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost
Frye Gaillard4
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About
Frye Gaillard has given us a deeply personal history, bringing his keen storyteller's eye to this pivotal time in American life. He explores the competing story arcs of tragedy and hope through the political and social movements of the times - civil rights, black power, women's liberation, the War in Vietnam, and the protests against it. But he also examines the cultural manifestations of change - music, literature, art, religion, and science - and so we meet not only the Brothers Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, but also Gloria Steinem, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Harper Lee, Mister Rogers, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Billy Graham, Thomas Merton, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Angela Davis, Barry Goldwater, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Berrigan Brothers.
"There are many different ways to remember the sixties," Gaillard writes, "and this is mine. There was in these years the sense of a steady unfolding of time, as if history were on a forced march, and the changes spread to every corner of our lives. As future generations debate the meaning of the decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer's reconstruction and remembrance of a transcendent era - one that, for better or worse, lives with us still."
"There are many different ways to remember the sixties," Gaillard writes, "and this is mine. There was in these years the sense of a steady unfolding of time, as if history were on a forced march, and the changes spread to every corner of our lives. As future generations debate the meaning of the decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer's reconstruction and remembrance of a transcendent era - one that, for better or worse, lives with us still."
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Reviews
"There is a bittersweet pleasure in reading A Hard Rain, Frye Gaillard's very personal account of the 1960s, and the subtitle captures our ambivalence: Our Decade of Hope, Possibility and Innocence Lost. Gaillard's graceful narrative may be about a past decade, but ... the lost opportunities and the moral and political failures of the 1960s have returned to haunt us today."
Dan Carter, Education Foundation, University Professor Emeritus, University of South Carol
"A Hard Rain is essential reading for a time when an American president has willfully ignored the hard-earned lessons from our passage through the most tumultuous decade of social change since the Civil War."
Howell Raines, Former Executive Editor of The New York Times, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"Whether you came of age during the Sixties like author Frye Gaillard or were born after it like me, A Hard Rain is the new starting point for anyone who wants to understand the most impactful decade of the 20th century."
Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Professor of History, Ohio State University, author of Bloody Lownde