Todd Gitlin Books

Set in the tumultuous 1960s, the story follows a group of young activists united by their desire to instigate change amid the civil rights and anti-war movements. In a Midwestern college town in 1963, four women and four men confront the escalating violence of the era. As they engage in demonstrations, Melissa, a black student, heads to Mississippi to assist with voter registration, while others focus on organizing in a struggling white community in Cleveland. Sally faces a personal crisis with an illegal abortion, highlighting the era's challenges. As the Vietnam War intensifies, some group members shift their focus to anti-war efforts, while Valerie travels to Mexico to pursue her art studies. Matt, the son of a pro-war minister, grapples with his impending draft and experiences a transformative moment during his resistance journey. The group reconvenes in Chicago during the chaotic Democratic Convention of August 1968, where tensions escalate and confrontations with the police ensue. Amidst street fights and heated debates, Kurt re-evaluates his approach and seeks to collaborate with a liberal Congressman for legislative change. Meanwhile, Ronnie, a radical filmmaker, and Marcia, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, become entangled with the emerging Weathermen. The narrative weaves through these interconnected lives, culminating in a tragic conclusion.

New preface for this classic of media studies. One of the founders of SDS describes the response of the various news organizations and arrives at the way the New Left came to be characterized.

Say “the Sixties” and the images start coming, images of a time when all authority was defied and millions of young Americans thought they could change the world—either through music, drugs, and universal love or by “putting their bodies on the line” against injustice and war.Todd Gitlin, the highly regarded writer, media critic, and professor of sociology at  the University of California, Berkeley, has written an authoritative and compelling account of this supercharged decade—a decade he helped shape as an early president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and an organizer of the first national demonstration against the Vietnam war. Part critical history, part personal memoir, part celebration, and part meditation, this critically acclaimed work resurrects a generation on all its glory and tragedy.

A beautiful, elegiac novel of a father, a son, and the secrets that divide generations.In the seventy-fifth year of his life, on a sweltering August afternoon, Chester Garland, the distinguished psychiatrist, author, and campaigner for human rights, is struck by a subway train and dies. Soon after, his son Paul receives a thoroughly unexpected three diaries written decades earlier, in the year when Garland, on a trip to France,unaccountably walked out on his family and his profession.As cool, detached Paul, a cyberspace cartoonist, reads the diaries, he finally faces the event that has shadowed his life since childhood. He embarks, as his father had a quarter century earlier, on a pilgrimage of love and grief, of passions-religious, erotic, and intellectual-and of discovery that is as unexpected as it is moving.With grace and precision, Gitlin takes us on a journey not just across an ocean or across decades, but into the secret depths of two men's lives, which were forever changed in the aftermath of that tumultuous decade now known as "the sixties." A memorable portrait of a father and son locked in a biblical embrace, Sacrifice builds with quiet elegance to its shocking conclusion.

Ve své slavné knize Mills velkolepě obnažil dvě dominantní tendence hlavního proudu sociologie své doby - nafouklé dryáčnictví Velké te-orie a mikroskopickou marginálnost Abstraktního empiricismu, a to formou, která zůstává stejně tak důležitá a živá (a někdy i zábavná), jako byla před čtyřiceti lety. ... Čtyřicet let je v sociálních vědách dlouhá doba. Mění se jak styly a slovník, tak i převládající paradigma-ta. V době, kdy Mills tvořil, byl administrativní výzkum rostoucím odvětvím, a proto si jej také vybral jako objekt v Sociologické imagi-naci. Uprostřed studené války byl abstraktní empiricismus užitečný nejen pro korporace, ale i pro vládou sponzorované plánování.