Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts & The 60s: Years of Hope - Comparison The preface to Peter Collier and David Horowitz's Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties and the introduction to Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage both try to explain the authors' reasons for writing their books. Both books, based on nostalgia, deal with the good and the bad which have come out of the sixties. However, while Collier and Horowitz describe the sixties more as a time of destruction, Gitlin places more emphasis on the