Akron Public Library

Welcome to the most tumultuous summer of the twentieth century. It's 1969, and for the Levin family, the times are a-changing. Every year, the children have looked forward to spending the summer at their grandmother's historic home in downtown Nantucket. But like so much else in America, nothing is the same this year: Blair, the eldest sister, is stranded in Boston, pregnant with twins and unable to travel. Middle sister Kirby, caught up in the thrilling...

In the span of twelve months, America experienced the Woodstock Music Festival, Easy Rider, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, the Battle of Hamburger HIll, the birth of punk music, the Led Zeppelin invasion, the occupation of Alcatraz, and death at the Altamont Speedway. 1969 pushed the boudaries of stage (Oh!Calcutta!), screen (Midnight Cowboy), and print (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex). We witnessed the genesis of gay rights...

After being approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man, Easy embarks on an investigation that takes him from mountaintops to the desert, through South Central and into sex clubs and the homes of the fabulously wealthy, facing hippies, the mob, and old friends perhaps more dangerous than anyone else.

"During the academic calendar year of 1969 and 1970, there were 9000 protests and 84 acts of arson or bombings at schools across the country. Two and a half million students went on strike, and 700 colleges shut down. Witness to a Revolution, Clara Bingham's oral history of that year, brings readers into this moment when it seemed that everything was about to change, when the anti-war movement could no longer be written off as fringe, and when America...