Destructive Generation; Second Thoughts About the Sixties

San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2006. First Encounter paperback Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Good. [8], 414, [2] pages. Occasional footnotes. Notes. Index. Cover has some wear and soiling. Peter Anthony Dale Collier (June 2, 1939 - November 1, 2019) was an American writer and publisher. He was the founding publisher of conservative Encounter Books in California and held that position from 1998 until he resigned in 2005. The company moved from San Francisco to New York City, and Collier was replaced as publisher by Roger Kimball. With David Horowitz, Collier wrote many books that made The New York Times Best Seller list and was described by the New York Times Book Review as "the premier biographer of American dynastic tragedy." His book Medal of Honor: Profiles of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty (2003) profiled living recipients of the Medal. Collier was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966 when he became an editor at radical Leftist Ramparts magazine, the splashy, four-color publication that was influential in transmitting New Left ideas into the mainstream. Collier wrote about the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement and other radical organizations for Ramparts. He edited Ramparts until 1972. Collier and Horowitz organized a "Second Thoughts Convention" in Washington D.C. Their book about leaving the Left and becoming its enemies, Destructive Generation (1989), was compared to Whittaker Chambers' Witness. David Joel Horowitz (born January 10, 1939) is an American conservative writer and activist. Horowitz founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom. He rejected progressive ideas and became a defender of neoconservatism. As leading New Leftists in the Sixties, Peter Collier and David Horowitz were intimately involved in the radicalism of the day. Later on, they became the first of their generation to publicly reject the objectives of that revolutionary era and point out the cultural chaos it had left behind. Part memoir, part political analysis, part social history, DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION is the compelling story of their intellectual journey into and out of the radical trenches. Telling stories of the New Left's most famous (and infamous) personalities and events, Collier and Horowitz reveal the destructive legacy of the Sixties and the way in which that decade continues to cast a long shadow over politics and culture today. When it was first published more than a decade ago, DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION was a controversial bestseller that some critics compared to Whittaker Chambers' powerful political testament, WITNESS. This new edition contains new material which makes this classic work more relevant than ever in our own divided time.