"Others may think of the 1960s as The Last Good Time, but Kimball has no patience with such nostalgia. He sees this decade as a seedbed of excess and moral breakdown. He argues that the radical assaults on "the System" that took place then still define the way we live now - with intellectually debased schools and colleges, morally chaotic sexual relations and family life, and a degraded media and popular culture.".

"How did we get from there to here? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, after fantasies of immediate political revolution faded, many student radicals urged their followers to begin "the long march through the institutions." Radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse characterized this approach as working in the institutions of American life while also working against them.

Kimball says that to see how well this strategy succeeded, "you need look no further than your local museum, your children's school, your church (if you still go to church) and your workplace."".

"The Long March is organized around incisive portraits of the architects of America's cultural revolution - among them, Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated or once-celebrated gurus like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and Charles Reich.

In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Kimball finds a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guide-book of wrong turns, dead ends, and blind alleys that, tragically, became the roadmap to the present."--BOOK JACKET.