On Tuesday, August 13, at 7 pm at Vineyard Haven library, author Frye Gaillard will give a talk based on his newest book, “A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost.” Books will be available for purchase and signing, and refreshments will be served.
According to a press release, “A Hard Rain” focuses on the 1960s, a pivotal decade in American
history. With graceful prose and a storyteller’s eye, Frye Gaillard captures the hope and tragedy of the 1960s, beginning with the idealism of the civil rights movement, and ending with the violence brought about by the war in Vietnam. He also examines the cultural manifestations of change — music, literature, art, religion, and science — and so we meet not only the brothers Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, but also Gloria Steinem, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Harper Lee, Mister Rogers, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Billy Graham, Thomas Merton, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Angela Davis, Barry Goldwater, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Berrigan brothers.
Gaillard, writer in residence at the University of South Alabama, has written extensively on Southern race relations, politics, and culture. He is former Southern editor at the Charlotte Observer, where he covered Charlotte’s landmark school desegregation controversy, the
ill-fated ministry of televangelist Jim Bakker, the funeral of Elvis Presley, and the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
