U.S. Literature - Reference, Post-World War II American History - General & Miscellaneous, Literary Reference - Books & Reading, American Literature - Bibliography

Scriptures for a Generation

Name: Scriptures for a Generation
Author: Philip D. Beidler
ISBN: 9780820316413

by Philip D. Beidler

Write a review

Overview

At the heart of Scriptures for a Generation are dozens of detailed entries discussing individual writers and the particular importance of their texts - bona fide '60s classics ranging from The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five to Carlos Casteneda's The Teachings of Don Juan and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves. Represented as well are such works of revered elders as Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Beidler's coverage also extends to works of the early '70s that are clearly textual and spiritual extensions of the '60s: the Portola Institute's Last Whole Earth Catalog, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and others. An overview of reading and writing as both a product and prime mover of '60s culture precedes the main section. In his conclusion Beidler highlights the most notable efforts to document and interpret the era.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The political activism and social change of the 1960s were generated in part, according to Beidler, by the books published and read widely by students during that decade. Beidler, a professor of English at the University of Alabama, cogently critiques '60s writers whose books challenged entrenched ideas of race, class and gender, such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. Also represented are '60s theorists (Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown); antiwar novelists (Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller); and cultural revolutionaries (Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary). Beidler argues that the period was the last time a generation of Americans would respond so dramatically to the printed word; future cultural discourse, he maintains, will be dominated by audio-visual and electronic communication. (Nov.)

Library Journal

Beidler (Rewriting America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation, Univ. of Georgia Pr., 1991) celebrates the diversity of texts that both shaped the Zeitgeist of the Sixties and was born of that counterculture. It takes some insight (and memory) to confer on the anonymous, antidrug cautionary Go Ask Alice the same respect given Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. Indeed, Beidler's survey at times is too nonselective: Did Jerry Rubin really have anything to say that Abbie Hoffman didn't? This is an academic discourse with appeal to a certain popular audience, and Beidler concludes with an excellent bibliographical essay. Serious students might wish he had written a more ambitious, thematic book; instead, his chosen figures are in alphabetical order, so that Kahlil Gibran and Allen Ginsberg are adjacent but not Betty Friedan and Kate Millett. Recommended for all academic libraries that value provocative nonfiction.-Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., Pa.

Booknews

The '60s in America were extraordinary years of revolution and revelation and it is no coincidence, according to Beidler, that they were also a time of unprecedented literacy and widespread faith in the transformational power of books. This survey of '60s reading and writing first addresses the mythologies of the '60s and the relationship between '60s readers and the texts they were reading, then launches into an alphabetically-arranged guide to the writing of dozens of writers including Richard Alpert, Carlos Castaneda, Germaine Greer, Malcolm X, Henry David Thoreau and Tom Wolfe. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)