Purpose, organization of 'Boom!' unclear

BOOM! VOICES OF THE SIXTIES: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON THE '60S AND TODAY, by Tom Brokaw, Random House, 662 pages, $28.95.

Tom Brokaw, formerly of NBC, is best known as America's most popular network evening news anchor for 21 years — but he broke into book publishing before he retired with two well-received books, "The Greatest Generation" and a memoir, "A Long Way from Home."

Now he has taken on the controversial era of the '60s. He has produced an artificial political demarcation line of memories that begins with 1963 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy and ends with the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.

Not quite the entire '60s and almost half of the '70s.

Brokaw seems to be atoning for previously leaving the implication that only the World War II generation is worthy of serious study. Yet his look at the '60s is only marginally historical at best and anecdotal (based loosely on his own life during that decade) along with interviews with the famous.

He calls 1968 "the volcanic center of the Sixties, with landscape-altering eruptions every month: political shocks, setbacks in Vietnam, assassinations, urban riots, constant assaults on authority, trips on acid, and a trip around the moon."

He calls himself a "typical young white male" from the "prairie heartland" who had been a Boy Scout, attended Sunday school, drank too much beer in college but never smoked dope. He married "the love of his life," a high school classmate named Meredith in 1962 in a traditional Episcopal church wedding.

They moved to Omaha, Neb., to begin a new life with an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha TV station. He made $100 a week and could barely afford a $90 a month furnished apartment.

"Meredith," Brokaw writes, "who had a superior college record, couldn't find any work because, as one personnel director after another told her, 'You're a young bride. If we hire you, you'll just get pregnant before long and want maternity leave.'"

Brokaw was living in "an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm" over Vietnam and civil rights.

Moving into "the voices" of the period, Brokaw quotes John Lewis, one of the leaders of the Selma, Ala., march for racial equality, telling how a police billy club was cracked over his head, knocking him unconscious. During the civil rights crusade, Lewis was arrested more than 40 times.