THE 60S UNPLUGGED:

A KALEIDOSCOPIC HISTORY OF A DISORDERLY DECADE

Gerard DeGroot (Macmillan, £20)

Born in 1965, I am rather proud of my earliest dateable memory - a somewhat traumatic first day at school in swinging, erm, Birmingham, in September 1969. In other words, I remember the sixties - I was there'.

Stretching it a bit, I know, and I am reminded of the oft-quoted maxim that if you remember the sixties you weren't there, so perhaps upon reflection I should forget my childhood trauma and ally myself with that presumably vast cadre of beautiful people for whom the decade is just a blur.

The sixties is framed, by young and old alike, as a mythical era of flower power and free love, centring on the twin nodes of Haight-Ashbury and London. Think Beatles, think Vietnam, think Neil Armstrong's one small step for man'.

But what was it really like? The answers are to be found in Gerard DeGroot's gripping new account of an extraordinary decade.

Rather than aim for a conventional, all-encompassing but dull chronological survey of events, DeGroot chops the decade up into bite-sized chunks, effectively mini-essays' on a whole variety of relevant topics from the era.

And it works - I read the book from cover to cover but you could, I suspect, read the sub-sections in more or less any order, or just read the ones that interested you.

However you approach it, the effect, as the book's subtitle suggests, is to produce a "kaleidoscopic history", in which the whole emerges as more than the sum of its parts.

Whatever your reasons for not remembering the sixties, this highly entertaining and accomplished survey of the decade will more than bring you up to speed.

So switch on your lava lamp, light a joss stick and fetch that kaftan from the wardrobe in readiness for a roller-coaster journey through the swinging sixties.