Synopses & Reviews
Last Season of Innocence discusses the younger half of the actors in the 1960s who experienced the decade from the prism of junior high school, high school, and the first year of college. These young people formed the nucleus of the youth culture revolution of the 1960s and yet, due to the upward expansion of the definition of youth and youth culture, have been under-represented in previous narratives of this decade. These are the young people who read Seventeen and Mad, watched more television than their older siblings, and tended to listen to 45 rpm singles or mono LP's more than the more sophisticated stereo albums of their older siblings. Substantial numbers of these teens could and did join political protests but they also engaged in a more personal daily struggle with school dress codes and parental intrusion on social life. In a nation where a third of the population was under nineteen, they were hardly invisible, but their experience seems to have been marginalized by the twenty-somethings who largely redefined the meaning of the youth culture and took center stage in doing so. Brooks offers a unique account of the much-chronicled 1960s by examining the experiences of these pre-teens and teenagers.
Synopsis
Last Season of Innocence discusses the lives of the preteens and teenagers who were in junior high school, high school, and the first year of college in the 1960s. These are the young people who read Seventeen and Mad, watched more television than their older siblings, and tended to listen to 45 rpm singles or mono LPs rather than the more sophisticated stereo albums of their older siblings. Substantial numbers of these teens could and did join political protests, but they also engaged in a more personal daily struggle with school dress codes and parental intrusion on social life. In a nation where a third of the population was under nineteen, they were hardly invisible, but their experience seems to have been marginalized by the twenty-somethings who largely redefined the meaning of the youth culture and took center stage in doing so. Brooks offers a unique account of the much-chronicled 1960s by examining the experiences of these preteens and teenagers.