Williams, a specialist in American studies, offers an impressionistic and idiosyncratic interpretation of the transformations that swept though American culture in the 1960s. Moving from childhood through his teenage years in that decade, Williams suggests that the turbulence and currents of change prevalent then shaped not only his consciousness, but that of the baby-boom generation as a whole.

His core argument is that from the Civil Rights Movement, through Vietnam protests and campus unrest to counterculture experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs and the orgiastic frenzy of Woodstock, and even to the “Helter Skelter” murders of Charles Manson's followers, the 1960s illustrate a recurring theme in American life: the abandonment of structure with a concomitant quest for freedom. In Williams's telling, this journey is akin to the mythic Jason seeking after the Golden Fleece, as well as to the biblical Hebrews escaping from bondage in Egypt in search of the Promised Land. For Jason and the Hebrews, as well as for boomers coming of age in the 1960s, the quest for a new Eden led into the wilderness, into a void, with hope shattered amid the chaos of emptiness.

To a large extent, the basics of Williams's analysis are familiar. Old structures did disappear. For example, the Civil Rights movement really did begin to dismantle structures of racism, and the exhilaration of drug-induced transcendence may have shattered the shackles of an arrogant scientism and rationalism that unleashed the horrors of napalm on Vietnam instead of bringing, in the words of the old DuPont slogan, “better living through chemistry.” But the details of his rambling interpretation, with frequent allusions to Reformation-era figures like Luther and Calvin and claims that nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson and twentieth century singer/songwriter Bob Dylan are soul mates in breaking out of the confinement of “conditioned consciousness,” will arouse anxiety among readers. But that same anxiety Williams finds propelling those he idealizes to shatter the bars of confining cages of political, social, and cultural structure.

For example, Williams consistently identifies any impulse toward structure, which he always ties to tyranny over the essential spirit of individuals, with Arminianism, while he labels the freedom that comes from destroying that tyranny with an Antinomianism that results in anarchy. His models for each come from Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey's Randle P. McMurphy represents the surge toward freedom, and Nurse Ratched, the confining cage of structure.

But there is a fundamental problem here. Arminianism emerged in Dutch theological circles in the latter sixteenth century as a counter to Calvinistic notions of determinism and predestination; in other words, it was a move to dismantle rigid theological structure. Arminian thought celebrated human choice, the free will to choose and act. As such, it was the polar opposite of structure. In the American context, Antinomianism is usually understood in terms of the controversy surrounding Anne Hutchinson in the 1630s. Hutchinson, while not abandoning much of Calvinistic theology, did place the experience of revelation coming to the individual directly from God above all human authority. So, there is a hint of Arminianism here, although her opponents saw it as anarchic “anything goes” freedom. Most students of Christian thought would be far more inclined to see Antinomianism as a theological cousin of Arminianism, not its enemy and opposite, for both make the individual the final authority in discerning and accepting truth.

In one sense, then, Williams's typology becomes a structural cage of its own that makes some of his impressions questionable, even if intriguing. One case in point concerns the American Protestant theological giant Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Williams mistakenly identifies as being a pastor in Detroit throughout the 1930s — Niebuhr became a pastor in Detroit in 1915, but left in 1928 to teach social ethics at New York's Union Theological Seminary. Niebuhr was one of the major voices for neo-orthodoxy in Protestant thought, although he preferred the label “Christian realism.” To Williams, Niebuhr's posture echoed his own idiosyncratic understanding of Arminianism, and he claims that Niebuhr's theology was emblematic of the caged structure of the 1950s that left him (Niebuhr) unable to act in the struggle for freedom and for the discovery of the essential self.

The record, however, demonstrates quite the opposite. A decade before the Civil Rights movement began to shape the 1960s, Niebuhr pinpointed racism and segregation as the basic flaws within American life. He became an unwavering advocate of social justice so far as African-Americans were concerned. When the controversy surrounding Vietnam consumed the nation — another of the hallmarks Williams sees as breaking down debilitating structures that quash essential freedom — contrary to what Williams suggests, Niebuhr joined in the opposition to the war. He remained a critic of American policy until his death in 1971.

Williams is on stronger ground when he plays with the role of countercultural drug experimentation and the fascination with the pop psychology in Norman O. Brown's Love's Body. Surely, part of the fascination with experience in the sense of what one felt, not necessarily what one reasoned out, that came with the drug subculture and Brown's call for the abolition of repression stemmed from concerns about the world being created and governed by technological advancement. The cry to legitimize inner experience was a call to recognize that human life is not simply mind, but also feeling — what in the eighteenth century folk called “the affections” (a term even then intended to distinguish feeling from sheer emotion). The rush toward science and technology that followed on the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 was seen as barren, unless complemented by an appreciation of sensibility and what a later age would again call spirituality.

Even so, one wishes that Williams had more directly addressed what his title implies, a search for an ultimate ground of meaning or God. He is too content to see the 1960s as leaving us in a cultural abyss, a wilderness of anarchy, that only a Nurse Ratched refitted for a new age can rescue. So he ignores much of the theological and religious ferment of the age, from the brief intrigue with “Death of God” theology to the monumental achievements that followed the adaptation of Latin-American liberation theology in African-American, feminist, and gay theology. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) not only opened the door to rethinking the very foundations of one of the most structured expressions of Christianity, the Roman Catholic heritage, but it also gave birth to a renaissance of liturgical expression, a recasting of Catholic theology (e.g., the work of Hans Kűng), and increased voice for both laity and American bishops in ordering church life. In other words, not all was wilderness and anarchy, nor was rigid caged structure the only alternative.

There is much else with which careful cultural historians will quibble. Williams places James Meredith at the University of Alabama rather than at the University of Mississippi; he repeatedly misnames the final book of the New Testament as Revelations. Such slips abound with enough frequency as to become irksome. But at moments, one wonders if they are intentional. Why? Making repeated appearances in Williams's work are Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose transcontinental journey and hallucinogen-inspired exploits were recounted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Although Williams suggests that the Pranksters embarked on a journey that had no destination other than chaotic wilderness, along the way they jolted the consciousness of many, urging them to break free from the chains of oppressive structure and celebrate the freedom of being one's essential self, a self that was part of transcendent rather than empirical reality.

Perhaps Williams is a tour guide leading his readers on a chaotic journey; curious interpretations and factual errors force readers to break out of the structure of his narrative and find the freedom of crafting the tale into a personal story of their own. When one does that, the search will end and the journey is over. But if so, like the young, those readers will always be asking, “Are we there yet?” The destination, however, remains unknown and elusive.