Let's travel back to the Sixties in "The Shattering" with Kevin Boyle

The 1960s in America began on a promising note. The Eisenhower years, seen as a time of complacency and conformity, came to an end with the election of a charismatic young President who named his administration the New Frontier. The era of peace and prosperity appeared to continue and Americans looked forward to a bright future in which they would lead the world and explore other worlds. In The Shattering: America in the 1960s, journalist and historian Kevin Boyle takes his readers through the decade in which the American Dream crashed into the brutal realities of the divisions among Americans that shredded the illusion of a happy and united country. Told largely from the point of view of a working class neighborhood in Chicago inhabited by the children of Polish and Irish immigrants, Boyle examines the rise of white grievance and right-wing populism, which exploited by Barry Goldwater and George Wallace and then mastered by Richard Nixon and became the basis of modern Republican strategy. He traces the explosive effects of the Civil Rights movement, the opposition to the Vietnam War and the struggles for reproductive rights and sexual freedom. America emerged a better, most just nation as a result of the victories won by these liberal movements, but they would ignite a fierce backlash that continues to this day. Indeed, a reading of The Shattering can help us understand how we came to be the bitterly divided people we are now.