The award-winning author of 'Arc of Justice' talks about his new book, 'The Shattering,' and how he came to write history for people like his father.
“The Shattering,” his new history of the 1960s, with just a photograph. A group stands in front of a modest bungalow. Fathers and sons; mothers and daughters. The men are in shirt-sleeves or aloha shirts, the women in capri pants or summer skirts. American flags fly on all the houses stretching down the block. It looks like a scene from the original “The nostalgic setup — July 4, 1961, on a “rising middle class” block in Chicago — is deliberate.
What stability the Cahills had achieved, he added, “was built on some real injustices, on racial exclusion and racial oppression, the power of the military-industrial complex and a very narrow sense of what intimate life should be like. But it was for Stella a remarkable thing, and what the ‘60s does is break it open.”In “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties,” Mike Davis and Jon Wiener track the uprisings, outrages and elections that shaped the city.
Stepping back from the Cahills, Boyle — who radiates a contagious teacher’s enthusiasm — writes of multiple protest movements that overlapped. His civil rights era is hardly monolithic. “There’s this sensibility that everyone in that movement should have had the same ideas.
Boyle’s complicated approach to a mythologized era grew directly out of his efforts to teach a class about it. “Students will often think about the 1960s as the classic triumvirate of sex, drugs and rock and roll and I’m trying to say there is something much more profound going on here.” He wanted to reconnect a new generation
to a period fast receding from living memory — beginning with a 1961 photo nearly as distant from today as that era was from the 19But first Boyle had to make it interesting: “You’re trying to hook people.” He fills the book with evocative vignettes, often of lesser-known figures. There’s
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