The fifties An underground history

A storyteller's exploration of the hidden, ground-level experience of the 1950s, this book explores four social and moral grievances from the period--gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmentalism--which exploded more visibly into the public sphere in the following decade. This is not a story of counterculture, e.g., the Beat generation and rock 'n' roll. Rather, in addressing social justice movements, the book explores the uneasy accommodation of and emerging resistance to the white, patriarchal, heterosexual decade of a largely self-confident and complacent postwar American mainstream. Gaines, the former managing editor of Time magazine, intentionally employs synecdoche as a narrative structure, using individuals and their stories to represent larger realities. The dust jacket correctly calls the book's subjects the "accidental radicals--people motivated not by politics but by their own most intimate conflicts." The result is a very human view of the crushing weight of expectations and conformity mainstream society demanded during the decade. Each thematic chapter has its own similarly thematic bibliography--a very effective arrangement for lay readers. This volume, which would be a good book-club selection, is much more enjoyable reading than standard academic history. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers and lower-division undergraduates. --Richard L Saunders, Southern Utah University

Historian Gaines (For Liberty and Glory) delivers a compassionate and insightful group portrait of "singular men and women" who spoke out on LGBTQ issues, women's rights, civil rights, and the environment in the 1950s. Documenting how these pioneers sowed the seeds for the political, cultural, and legal sea changes of the 1960s and '70s, Gaines spotlights Harry Hay, founder of the gay rights advocacy group the Mattachine Society; Gerda Lerner, an Austrian Jewish refugee from the Holocaust who taught the first women's history course in the U.S. at the New School in 1962; Medgar Evers, the original field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi, whose desegregation efforts led to his murder in 1963; and cybernetics originator Norbert Wiener, who warned of "the many ways cutting-edge technologies could benefit humanity but also draw its blood." Other profile subjects include feminist Betty Friedan, conservationist Rachel Carson, and civil rights activist Robert F. Williams. Gaines provides essential historical context and vividly captures the resilience of these and other "authentic rebels" who battled the FBI, McCarthyism, the medical industry, and the Ku Klux Klan "in a time infamous for rewarding conformity and suppressing dissent." This revisionist history is packed with insights. Illus. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill. (Jan.)

A history of the courageous men and women who roiled postwar complacency. In his latest book, former Timemanaging editor Gaines debunks the image of the 1950s as a period of quiet contentment. Although the postwar period was "hostile to change," American society, Gaines reveals, was prodded by activists who dared to speak out against sexism, racism, classism, and environmental contamination. Drawing on histories, memoirs, reportage, and government documents, the author creates a vigorous group biography of several feisty individuals who risked isolation and censure by advocating for systemic change. His subjects include Harry Hay, a closeted gay man who founded the Mattachine Society, "the first sustained advocacy group for gay rights in American history"; feminist lawyer Pauli Murray, feminist historian Gerda Lerner, and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, all of whom "saw that race, class, and gender were inseparable, mutually reinforcing sources of discrimination that could only be defeated on the basis of that understanding"; Black veterans such as Isaac Woodard, Medgar Evers, James Forman, and Aaron Henry, who became leaders in a variety of significant civil rights organizations throughout the South; and philosopher and mathematician Norbert Wiener and biologist Rachel Carson, who, from their vastly different perspectives, "converged on the heretical, even subversive idea that the assertion of mastery over the natural world was based on an arrogant fantasy that carried the potential for disaster." Each individual confronted formidable obstacles: Hay, for example, faced the challenge of arousing support from men who feared exposure and "inspiring solidarity in people who had never wished to be known as a group, around questions most had never asked." Carson, who wrote Silent Springwhile being treated for advanced cancer, battled a campaign mounted by the chemical industry. Black GIs came home from the war to face violent racist uprisings. Hamer, who worked as a sharecropper in Mississippi until she was 45, was thrown off the cotton plantation when she tried to register to vote. Inspiring activists populate a useful revisionist history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.