BOOKS

...In her middle seventies, novelist and poet May Sarton struggled for most of a year to recover from a slight stroke which did not impair her speech but left her debilitated from the side effects of medication...

...The problems the movement faced are described fairly and with compassion...

...Movement violence, as Gitlin accurately describes it, was a form of moral witness, another side of the nonviolent coin...

...Gitlin's emphasis is on the movement as he experienced it: the intellectually precocious early SDS and, after 1967, the radical scene at Berkeley where the counterculture and the New Left spectacularly merged...

...Failing to achieve moral perfection and unwilling to settle for anything less, the movement took the ambiguities of process as the absolutism of defeat...

...Gitlin's analysis is careful and judicious throughout...

...In spite of these quibbles, I applaud Gitlin's achievement...

...The porch roof leaks, red squirrels invade the walls of her house by the sea, and the refrigerator breaks down...

...The movement abandoned nonviolence when it ceased producing immediate gains, but it never questioned its tactical dependence on direct action...

...Intensely conscious of time, she is ambivalent about her extensive correspondence...

...As she regains strength, she sets off across the country on poetry-reading and lecture trips but she concludes that the year will mark the end of her personal appearances...

...onstrations in Washington, Berkeley, and Chicago, the fusion of the counterculture and the political Left, the battle over People's Park, the beginning of the women's liberation movement, and the sectarian madness that destroyed the movement are recalled with admirable veracity...

...She rises early and settles at her typewriter shortly after breakfast...

...The isolation of the contemporary Left is one legacy of this blunder...

...The narrative covers most of the crucial events of the radical 1960s...

...But the past, in Gitlin's telling, consistently waylaid movement aspirations, making a mockery of the audacious (but doomed) attempt to transcend bourgeois culture and Old Left sectarianism...

...But Gitlin examines the constraints operating on liberals and suggests the possibility that a movement less bent on moral purity might, in some cases, have found advantages in the pragmatic compromises liberalism offered...

...He gives short shrift to community organizing...

...Gitlin also downplays the influence of radical pacifists, thereby missing an important reason, why the movement was so easily tempted into self-defeating violence...

...While they were sitting in kitchens talking to real people about concrete issues, men were off by themselves rapping about revolutionary abstractions...

...The book's strength is Gitlin's assured pursuit of the Zeitgeist, his understanding of the political culture that inspired activists to transcendent heights of courage and clarity and which then drove them beyond the bounds of rationality into a mindset of fervent, communal craziness...

...The Sixties has intelligence, verve, decency, and compassion, qualities that reflect the New Left's highest aspirations...

...The abdication of the democratic socialists (like Michael Harrington and Irving Howe), who were unable to tolerate the existence of a student movement that wouldn't kowtow to their anticommunist obsession, denied the movement experienced mentors...

...The grandiose expectations that activists could will themselves post-revolutionary personalities and that the movement could become a beloved community led to disillusionment and worse...

...She has quirks, a low boiling point, and domestic frustrations...

...Gitlin, now an associate professor of sociology at the University of California in Berkeley, spent a year as president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the early 1960s and participated in many of the movement's decisive events as an activist and writer...

...This was the first of a series of what the movement took as liberal betrayals...

...Precisely as the public came to accept the movement's antiwar position, the movement upped the ante and demanded allegiance to a revolutionary mood...

...Instead of a coalition with wimpy liberals, the movement would organize an army of angry teens...

...Gitlin treats both sides of this conflict fairly, suggesting that the split-as much generational as it was political-was probably inevitable...

...This open space (most of it cultural) contained the seeds both of opportunity and self-destruction...

...It did not merely want you to support a position...

...The New Left was more a mood than a program, he writes...

...by Marty Jezer In this emotionally truthful, critical account of the rise and fall of the New Left, Todd Gitlin addresses questions that haunt veterans of the radical insurgencies of the 1960s: How could a movement that began, in Gitlin's words, "by echoing Albert Camus and C. Wright Mills end with one faction chanting, Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, while members of the other waved their Little Red Books in the air and chanted Mao Mao Mao Tse-tung...

...How did we blow it...

...A telling confession of his own shortcomings organizing poor whites in Chicago and his account of the ease with which New Left women related to neighborhood women suggests one reason why the movement imploded...

...He has no axes to grind or scores to settle...

...Baby-boom demographics, however, suggested a majoritarian movement based upon rebellious youth...

...Women, who were concerned with issues of everyday life, had too little influence in the movement...

...Where did we go wrong...

...Although his understanding of the interaction of radical politics and culture is consummate, his narrow focus creates gaps in his overall analysis...

...Norton...

...The nonconforming individualism of the Beat Generation, juvenile delinquents, rock 'n' roll musicians, Marlon Brando's cinematic Wild One, and James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause helped young radicals kick over the 1950s, but they didn't provide the substance for mature, programmatic politics...

...the movement was riding currents that were out of its control...

...The 1960s were a fabulous time and Gitlin's prose crackles with excitement and immediacy, capturing the spirit, the way it was to be "in the movement...

...How could a movement so profoundly American alienate the public to such a degree that even now, two decades later, people sympathetic to left-wing ideas will not participate in movement organizations...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY Recuperation AFTER THE STROKE by May Sarton W.W...

...16.95...

...It is still a question whether the New Left organized young people to oppose the war or whether the hedonism of the youth revolt (propagated, Gitlin notes, in the same 1950s seedbed that nurtured the New Left) tempted political radicals away from political goals...

...Gitlin is superb in describing how, after 1967, cultural and political radicalism fused into a revolutionary hallucination...

...In Gitlin's analysis, it was not the result of any one miscalculation...

...The heroism of civil-rights workers braving white terror, the confrontation between the Mississippi Freedom Democrats and the Johnson Administration, antiwar demMarty Jezer, whose activism dates back to the early 1960s, wrote "The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960," published by South End Press...

...it wanted you to dive in, and the more total the immersion the better...

...Events are placed in a complex matrix of explosive cultural currents and contending political forces...

...Gitlin describes the movement as rising out of cracks in the Eisenhower consensus...

...Pacifist ban-the-bombers and nonviolent civil-rights activists defined movement politics as nonviolent direct action (as opposed to electoral politics and programmatic reform...

...280 pp...

...His book is not a dry, academic, above-the-battle piece of Monday-morning quarterbacking...

...In this informal journal, she shakes off the past to concentrate on each new day...