In Class Divide, Howard Gillette follows the Yale graduating class of 1964, of which he was a part, through their post-university lives in order to explore the cultural shifts of the late twentieth century. Gillette argues that post-1964 escalation in Vietnam and the draft, racial tension and urban civic disorder, and political polarization destroyed the hope of the JFK period. Graduating at the cusp of this turning point, his class are depicted as in the 1960s if not of them, a liminal generation split between the traditional patrician conformity of Yale and the progressive trends of the 1960s.

Gillette's primary source material is interviews and oral testimony. Arguing for the “illumination that comes from select experience” (xiii), Gillette creates a collective participant history, with each chapter focussing on two lives positioned on either side of issues including civil rights, the Vietnam war, the environmental movement, America's changing attitudes towards to gender and sexuality, and the culture wars, in order to paint a picture of a divided nation. Yale's class of ’64 certainly provides Gillette with enough material to cover this ground, with alumni including the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, former Republican attorney general John Ashcroft, New Historicist literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, environmental activist Gus Speth and civil rights activist and lawyer Stephen Bingham, as well as many more whose lives provide interesting and illuminating anecdotes that add personal insight to the broad brush of history.

Bingham's narrative perhaps best represents Gillette's vision of the 1960s. Involved in the early integrated civil rights movement, Bingham was radicalized by black nationalist politics and defended Black Panther George Jackson in 1971. Charged as an accessory to five murders after Jackson's bloody escape from prison, Bingham remained a fugitive until 1984. At his trial, prosecutor Fred Costillo stated, “you were either on one team or the other in the 1960s. Bingham was on the other” (67). Bingham acquitted nonetheless, Costillo's statements are used as an indicator of the polarization of America in the post-1960s period. Bingham's life, therefore, encapsulates the common narrative of the period: liberalism moving to radicalism and violence, engendering the polarization of American culture and politics and government repression in the process.

At times, Class Divide reinforces a well-worn binary narrative of the post-1960s period. This can be seen in the chapter “The Culture Wars and the University,” in which Greenblatt, a Yale ’64 graduate who also completed his PhD in the English Department, is placed in opposition to Yale professor of law and one-time Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Bork's Slouching towards Gomorrah (1996), which diagnosed a far-reaching decline in American culture, has become emblematic of the polemical division of the culture wars climate and is testament to the level of rancour this period of debate created. These two antagonists create a clear binary between post-1960s relativism and more traditional fundamentalist beliefs.

Yet whilst he was initially lured to Berkeley because of its countercultural edge, Greenblatt found himself in opposition to radical students when he continued to give seminars in his home during a student strike. His life adds nuance to the binary, as do his debates with fellow Shakespearean scholar and Yale professor of history Harald Bloom, both rejecting Yale's traditional New Criticism approach in different ways. Gillette uses moments like these to highlight his classmate's liminality. Such tensions are perhaps best exemplified in the chapter “Sex and Marriage,” in which men who “were largely socialized in traditional homes” (164) often found themselves in more progressive marriages, divorced, or embracing more permissive attitudes towards sex and sexuality even if they remained opposed to the politics of the 1960s.

Senator Joe Liberman is the figure to which Gillette returns most often and with most praise. Cast as a maverick in the Democratic Party before he left to become an independent, a liberal whose belief in meritocracy could not bend to support affirmative action, Liberman is described as “the only person in America who claims he has no idea who he's going to vote for” (219). Gillette depicts the Republican Ripton society, of which he was a part, similarly, as moderate individuals left behind by the polarized society. Ultimately, therefore, the aspects of Gillette's unique generation that he champions most seem unique only in so far as they anachronistically uphold the postwar liberal consensus, and whilst the anecdotes of his cohort are interesting, as a collective biography they reveal very little new about the period.