Whether we lived through it or not, the Sixties was the most formative and transformative decade of most of our lives: from the Kennedy years to Woodstock, the decade that keeps delighting us, angering us, teaching us, and haunting us.
A nonfiction companion to Stein’s Cats’ Eyes, a novel set in New York in the Sixties, Fifty Years Ago Today: The Sixties Then and Now combines cultural commentary and vivid on-the-scenes memories with a spirited discussion on how the legacy of the era can lead to future cultural and political awakenings. Fifty Years Ago Today is alive with the passions, the still burning controversies, and the lessons of the Sixties at a time when they’ve never been more vital to America and to the world.
“Fifty Years Ago Today shows us what the Age of Aquarius can teach us as we enter the Age of the Reality Show President. In this collection of essays, Michael Eric Stein draws on his wealth of knowledge and novel views of the Sixties and its repercussions to connect that time to this, to show us what we gained and lost then and what we have gained and lost since. Stein’s wide-ranging erudition is evident in every essay, and every page is full of his vivid, crackling prose. It’s all in the mix: Abbie Hoffman to Elon Musk, Dr. Strangelove to Survivor, the united purpose of the Sixties space program to the bridges crumbling under the weight of our political dysfunction to the hope of a new counterculture. In the perilous era we have now entered, I can’t think of a more pertinent—or more entertaining—read than Michael Eric Stein’s Fifty Years Ago Today.”
– Michael Takiff, Author, A Complicated Man: The Life of
Bill Clinton as Told by Those Who Know Him.
Fifty Years Ago Today: Table of Contents
STICKING TO OUR GUNS
Posted February 28, 2018, excerpted from FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY.
GENERATION GAPPED
Posted February 28, 2018, excerpted from FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY.
THE ULTIMATE ‘60S FILMMAKER.
Posted August 8, 2014, revised and expanded in FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY.
TRUMPING REALITY.
Posted (and predicting Trump’s probable victory) August 31, 2015, expanded, updated, and incorporated into “Moon Age Daydreams and TV Reality” chapter of FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY.
MAY BE THE LAST TIME.
Posted October 21, 2016, final blog of “Sixties Sense.”
Author Michael Eric Stein has been a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, television writer (Miami Vice, the CBS television movie Higher Ground), and a journalist writing on film, rock, jazz, and Hawaiian music and culture for Films In Review, the Los Angeles Times, and Maui No Ka Oi Magazine. He is a graduate of Yale University and the New York University Graduate School of Film and Television, and currently lives in New York City.