Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960's

by William L. O'Neill

Book Overview

This masterly chronicle of the 1960s, the twentieth century's most confounding decade, is an immensely readable book that combines wit with learning and seriousness with entertainment. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812901908
• ISBN13: 9780812901900
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co
• Length: 442 Pages
• Weight: 2.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

imparts immediacy to the history of a turbulent time

This has to be one of the best books written on the social history of the (in)famous sixties. Written right at the end of the decade, it well captures the dizzying series of events that made this decade, for all who lived through it, a time when changes just piled on each other, so many and so fast that it was hard to know if the result would be anything even remotely resembling the country one grew up in. Infused with the author's wry sense of humor and his sensibilities, it is a personal slant that nonetheless remains historically accurate. If you want a lively history that puts you in the middle of the tumult that was the sixties, look no further.

Coming Apart

A humorous, yet insightful perspective on the emotional roller coaster issues of the 1960s. A great read.

Early But Still Excellent History of the 1960s

This book was first published in 1971 (not 1969, as another review mistakenly states). O'Neill of course didn't have access to all of the archives and other resources that were opened later, but the book has an immediacy and comprehensiveness that most other histories of that decade lack; the author manages to extract telling details and useful information from the sources that he had at hand. The book is able to giver a vivid sense, at least as much as a historical account is able, of what it felt like to live through the 1960s in America.

Discussions of two very different cultures which clashed

There have been other histories of America during the 1960s, but Coming Apart: An Informal History Of America In The 1960s is both readable and involving, presenting the political and cultural focus with a twist of wit and sympathetic insight rare to an interpretation of the times. Discussions of two very different cultures which clashed, surveys of traditions challenged by the counter-culture, and discussions of civil rights issues alike are involving reads.

Brilliant, incisive, mordant, electric cultural history

O'Neill's Coming Apart was written in 1969 -- a fact that would seem to disqualify it as cultural history. But in fact the author's closeness to the zeitgeist, as well as his freewheeling willingness to speak his mind and waffle around with mummified standards of "argument" and "evidence" make for a truly good narrative. The author is an extremely smart, well-informed person who writes equally well about politics, diplomacy, the drug scene, Vietnam, and everything else that seemed to define the decade, and does so with a verve that makes you feel like you are there -- or at least there with the author. It is brilliantly informative, and funny at times. Deserves the Parkman Prize if there were any justice in the world.