This book examines the American Sixties, and how that period's socio-political essence was reflected and refracted in certain forms of the period's music. Its five main chapters bear the names of familiar musical categories: 'Folk,' 'Rock,' 'Jazz,' 'Avant-Garde,' 'Classical.' But the book's real subject matter-treated at length in the Prologue and the Epilogue but spread throughout all that comes between-is the Sixties' tangled mess of hopes and frustrations, of hungers as much for self-identity as for self-indulgence, of crises of conscience that bothered Americans of almost all ages and regardless of political persuasion.

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James Wierzbicki lives in the Australian town of Coober Pedy. For twenty year, he was the classical music critic for theSt. Louis Post-Dispatch and other American newspapers, and for another twenty years a professor at the University of California-Irvine, the University of Michigan, and the University of Sydney.