On July 4, 1961, the middle classes of a Chicago neighborhood gathered in front of their homes, in a sure visionary image of the American Dream. This vision was shattered over the next decade, as internal inequalities and external arrogance sparked powerful movements for civil rights and against the war. Assassinations, social violence, and the impact of a “silent majority” cracked the American fabric. The book The Shattering covers the tensions of the period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, focusing on the intense conflicts surrounding race, gender, and war. The civil rights political movement develops through the grassroots actions of the protests in Montgomery and sit-ins, passing through the violence in Birmingham and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the disappointments of King’s campaign in Chicago, the rising Black nationalist ideology, and Nixon's politics around education and the Supreme Court. The Vietnam War unfolds as a Cold War policy, with the political struggle influenced by powerful popular mobilizations and a painful experience at the front. Americans' challenges against government regulation of sexuality offer landmark decisions regarding privacy rights, gay rights, contraception, and abortion. Kevin Boyle records the inspiring and harsh events of this passionate era with remarkable empathy that restores the humanity of the people who wrote this history. Often they are everyday people like Elizabeth Eckford, who withstands a hostile mob outside her newly integrated high school in Little Rock, or Estelle Griswold, who welcomes her arrest for providing contraceptive information in a Connecticut town. Political leaders also appear in revealing detail: we witness the legacies of Richard Nixon from Eisenhower and his debt to George Wallace, which shaped a message of racism combined with the working-class resentment that Nixon embodied in the Republican Party. The Shattering illuminates currents that continue to run through our politics. It is a story for our times.