Excellent review of the year in America, with a bit of overkill on sports. ( )

This is a great read for students of history, those who lived through it and those who have arrived long after but want some insight into the cultural, political, economic and social changes that ended the golden promise of the 60’s and informed the “Me” generation of the 70’s and right on through to today.

I am the last of the baby boomers. It was fun to look back at the incredible year that 1969 was: from the moon walk to Manson. It reflected so many of the things we referenced as teenagers in the coming decade. And as surprising as it might sound, this was a year that really closed the decade out in a negative way. Peace and love gave way to social unrest and violence.

The decade is covered in detail. Each chapter addresses an issue that was important (Vietnam, anti-war protests) or culturally significant (man’s walk on the moon, Woodstock, the Tate/LaBianca murders). There are a million other tings in between that are of equal or greater interest to the reader.

1969 is a real demarcation line. For those of you (us) who watched and enjoyed “Mad Men”, 1969 is the real coda to that series. Don Draper may well have ended the decade buying the world a Coke and flashing the peace sign after his est retreat, but the real end of that decade was much darker.

Like many kids coming into the world today, the first ten years of my life were marked by Walter Cronkite and Harry Reasoner sharing the nightly tally of death from Vietnam. It influenced artistic choices and interests for me. The music changed from bubble gum pop to harder edged progressive rock, rock operas and the more internally focused singer/songwriter genre. Woodstock, three days of peace and love, gave way to Altamont, one day and night of death and destruction.

Johnson’s socially progressive domestic policy and disastrous foreign policy gave Tricky Dick Nixon the leverage he needed to vault into the White House after his terrible showing opposite Kennedy. We saw Buddhists and students and then middle America, oppose our involvement in an unwinnable war that the Vietnamese had been waging for more than 50 years against the French, the English, The Americans and each other.

The bottom line is that I loved this book. It is well worth reading as in a few short years, it will be a half century since 1969. This is a good time to look back and review our mistakes as well as our successes and take stock as a nation. ( )

Oh how we forget when everything is swirling around us. To see the events of the entire year laid out before us is mind-boggling. Of course the major events are well remembered and often discussed, but who could remember the Broadway plays, books and music that were instrumental in changing our culture. And even though the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago and the massacre at My Lai were in 1968 we had to deal with the trials and aftermaths in 1969.

The book is short explanations of events arranged by season with an epilogue tying together the decade and the spillover into the 70s. Easy to read and also easy to skip over parts you don't want to remember, such as the Zodiac killings.

This is the year I graduated from high school and I would often remark that it was such a pivotal year for politics and space exploration and music. But this is much more than I can remember and I am grateful to the author for putting it all together. It was a remarkable ending to a bitter and derisive decade. ( )