An exciting and enlightening revisionist history (Walter Isaacson #1 New York Times
bestselling author) that upends the myth of the 1950s as a decade of conformity and celebrates
a few solitary brave and stubborn individuals who pioneered the radical gay rights feminist
civil rights and environmental movements from historian James R. Gaines. An enchanting
beautifully written book about heroes and the dark times to which they refused to surrender
(Todd Gitlin bestselling author of The Sixties). In a series of character portraits The
Fifties invokes the accidental radicals-people motivated not by politics but by their own most
intimate conflicts-who sparked movements for change in their time and our own. Among many
others we meet legal pathfinder Pauli Murray who was tortured by both her mixed-race heritage
and her in between sexuality. Through years of hard work and self-examination she turned her
demons into historic victories. Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited her for the argument that made sex
discrimination unconstitutional but that was only one of her gifts to the 21st-century
feminism. We meet Harry Hay who dreamed of a national gay rights movement as early as the
mid-1940s a time when the US Soviet Union and Nazi Germany viewed gay people as subversives
and mentally ill. And in perhaps the book's unlikeliest pairing we hear the prophetic voices
of Silent Spring's Rachel Carson and MIT's preeminent mathematician Norbert Wiener who from
their very different perspectives-she is in the living world he in the theoretical
one-converged on the then-heretical idea that our mastery over the natural world carried the
potential for disaster. Their legacy is the environmental movement. The Fifties is an
inspiration...[and] a reminder of the hard work and personal sacrifice that went into fighting
for the constitutional rights of gay people Blacks and women as well as for environmental
protection (The Washington Post). The book carries the powerful message that change begins not
in mass movements and new legislation but in the lives of the decentered often lonely
individuals who learn to fight for change in a daily struggle with themselves.
