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Audiobook
First published January 1, 1993
“At the very instant of the Trinity explosion, Oppenheimer quoted a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One. . . I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.’”
“One of the most powerful currents taking place and changing in American life in this decade—taking place even as few recognized it—was the increasing impact and importance of black culture on daily American life.”
“I am a child of the fifties. I graduated from high school in 1951, from college in 1955, and my values were shaped in that era. I wanted to write a book which would not only explore what happened in the fifties, a more interesting and complicated decade than most people imagine, but in addition, to show why the sixties took place—because so many of the forces which exploded in the sixties had begun to come together in the fifties, the pace of life in America quickened.”
It was not by chance that the names of Central American and Caribbean dictators came toThe Sixties are generally considered the civil rights decade, but important civil right events that occurred during the Fifties includes Brown v. Board of Education, Emmett Till, Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Little Rock integration of Central High.
read like a rogue's list of the region's most despised despots: Somoza, Trujillo, Batista, Ubico of Guatemala, and Galvez of Honduras. All of them were backed by the American government and its partner in the area, United Fruit. (p.376)