The Shattering, Kevin Boyle
The Shattering, Kevin Boyle
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
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The Shattering
America in the 1960s

Author: Kevin Boyle

Narrator: Jonathan Yen

Unabridged: 18 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/26/2021


Synopsis

On July 4, 1961, the rising middle-class families of a Chicago neighborhood gathered before their flag-bedecked houses, a confident vision of the American Dream. That vision was shattered over the following decade, its inequities at home and arrogance abroad challenged by powerful civil rights and antiwar movements. Assassinations, social violence, and the blowback of a "silent majority" shredded the American fabric.

Covering the late 1950s through the early 1970s, The Shattering focuses on the period's fierce conflicts over race, sex, and war. The civil rights movement develops from the grassroots activism of Montgomery and the sit-ins, through the violence of Birmingham and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the frustrations of King's Chicago campaign, a rising Black nationalism, and the Nixon-era politics of busing and the Supreme Court.

Kevin Boyle captures the inspiring and brutal events of this passionate time with a remarkable empathy that restores the humanity of those making this history. Often they are everyday people like Elizabeth Eckford, enduring a hostile crowd outside her newly integrated high school in Little Rock, or Estelle Griswold, welcoming her arrest for dispensing birth control information in a Connecticut town.

About Kevin Boyle

Kevin Boyle is the author of Arc of Justice, winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.


Reviews

Goodreads review by robin on November 08, 2023

The United States In The 1960s In the third chapter of "The Shattering" (2021), Kevin Boyle's history of the tumultuous 1960s, the concept of the "Beloved Community" receives considerable attention and, in fact, constitutes the chapter's title. While exploring the Civil Rights Movement during the lat......more

Goodreads review by Clif on October 04, 2022

The Shattering provides a history of the 1960s with particular emphasis on the era’s central struggles: racial justice, the Vietnam War and reproductive freedom. Though the subtitle references the 60s, the chronology that’s covered includes plenty of history from the 50s through the 80s. This is a h......more

Goodreads review by Craig on November 01, 2021

Kevin Boyle is a top tier historian and a very good writer, so I was anticipating this book when I saw it announced. I wound up slightly disappointed, but the reasons probably have as much to do with my own approach to the topic--I'm writing a book that would from the surface to be fairly similar--a......more

Goodreads review by Michael on November 23, 2021

It was good but it just didn't feel all that necessary, especially after other 1960s books.......more

Goodreads review by Mark on March 23, 2024

The Shattering is a fast-paced, fairly high level history of the 60's written in a lively journalistic style, even though the author is an academic historian, not a journalist. It juggles three main story lines: the civil rights movement and its offshoots; Cold War foreign policy, especially as it p......more