"An insightful and beautifully written effort to address the significance of 1968 as the moment when America 'turned' away from the myth of its own innocence. Wyatt has a solid grasp of some of the most significant memoirs and novels to emerge from the 1960s, and he nicely combines this creative writing with historical scholarship to illuminate the tensions and contradictions of that era as well as the efforts to come to terms with them."--Scott Laderman, author of Tours of Vietnam: Wars, Travel Guides, and Memory "With empathy and insight, Wyatt orchestrates a richly varied chorus of voices evoking not only what happened in the fraught year of 1968 but what it felt like and what it meant. His book is as much about the literature of witness and recollection as about the tumultuous events themselves."--Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden and Dancing in the Dark "Four and a half decades after 1968, its major events are well known but not fully understood. For David Wyatt it was a year when a few individuals made or acted on decisions that brought about a 'turning' in American public life. He recreates the circumstances of those decisions, drawing on his personal memories as a college student, extensive research, and his mature meditations on that annus mirabilis. In this way he retrieves a past that is 'usable' in the sense that it may help us negotiate the turnings of our own era.

"--Milton J. Bates, author of The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling "One of the things I like best about the book is that the author refuses to find villains in the story. He writes with great sympathy for nearly all the players in the drama."--Timothy Parrish, author of From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction "Wyatt's interdisciplinary research allows him to highlight the process of understanding the past even as he explains how this particular year has become so entrenched in Americans' cultural memory. This engaging vision of 1968 should appeal to readers in history, English, American studies, and cultural studies. Highly recommended."-- Choice "A remarkably readable analysis of how the events of 1968 shaped--and continue to frame--contemporary American politics and culture. The careful fusion of literary analysis with political events provides the reader with unconventional insights on how to make sense of the year's events.

"-- Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics.