Sixties: BIG IDEAS//Small Books

A brilliant, alternative take on sixties swinging London, Jenny Diski offers radical reconsiderations of the social, political, and personal meaning of that turbulent era.

What was Jenny Diski doing in the sixties? A lot: dropping out, taking drugs, buying clothes, having sex, demonstrating, and spending time in mental hospitals. Now, as Diski herself turns sixty years old, she examines what has been lost in the purple haze of nostalgia and selective memory of that era, what endures, and what has always been the same. From the vantage point of London, she takes stock of the Sexual Revolution, the fashion, the drug culture, and the psychiatric movements and education systems of the day. What she discovers is that the ideas of the sixties often paved the way for their antithesis, and that by confusing liberation and libertarianism, a new kind of radicalism would take over both in the UK and America.

Witty, provocative, and gorgeously written, Jenny Diski promises to feed your head with new insights about everything that was, and is, the sixties.

Author: Jenny Diski
Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
Published: 09/01/2009
Pages: 162
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.32lbs
Size: 7.16h x 4.70w x 0.45d
ISBN: 9780312427214

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2009
Vanity Fair 09/01/2009 pg. 162
Booklist 08/01/2009 pg. 22
Library Journal 09/01/2009 pg. 130
New York Times Book Review 08/30/2009 pg. 7
Publisher's Weekly Annex 08/03/2009

About the Author

JENNY DISKI is the author of eight novels and two books of travel/memoir. Her journalism appears regularly in The London Review of Books.