SOURCE: Marquand, Robert. “When Youth Rode ‘A Wave of Privileged Vision.’” Christian Science Monitor (8 January 1988): B3.

In the following review of The Sixties, Marquand maintains that Gitlin has illuminated aspects of 1960s history not covered in the mainstream press.

The 1960s in America were not “history as usual.” Vietnam, Freedom Rides, assassinations, sit-ins, the Summer of Love, women's liberation, student revolt, Apollo 11, the Rolling Stones—all ran together, creating a time that seemed to exist outside “normal history.”

As Todd Gitlin's excellent new work [The Sixties] shows, nowhere was this more true than in the “New Left,” the student “Movement” of the '60s. The flagship of the New Left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), of which Gitlin was an early leader, grew from a few hundred members in 1960 to more than 100,000 by the demonstrations outside the Democratic convention in Chicago, 1968.

As in the transcendentalist movement in...