| Title | : | By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0062820397 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780062820396 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 400 |
| Publication | : | First published June 8, 2021 |
The political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s was perhaps one of the most tumultuous in this country's history, shaped by the fight for civil rights, women’s liberation, Black power, and the end to the Vietnam War. In many ways, this second American revolution was a belated fulfillment of the betrayed promises of the first, striving to extend the full protections of the Bill of Rights to non-white, non-male, non-elite Americans excluded by the nation’s founders.
Based on exclusive interviews, original documents, and archival research, By the Light of Burning Dreams explores critical moments in the lives of a diverse cast of iconoclastic leaders of the twentieth century radical movement: Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; Heather Booth and the Jane Collective, the first underground feminist abortion clinic; Vietnam War peace activists Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda; Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers; Craig Rodwell and the Gay Pride movement; Dennis Banks, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Russell Means and the warriors of Wounded Knee; and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s politics of stardom. Margaret and David Talbot reveal the epiphanies that galvanized these modern revolutionaries and created unexpected connections and alliances between individual movements and across race, class, and gender divides.
America is still absorbing—and reacting against—the revolutionary forces of this tumultuous period. The change these leaders enacted demanded much of American society and the human imagination. By the Light of Burning Dreams is an immersive and compelling chronicle of seven lighting rods of change and the generation that engraved itself in American narrative—and set the stage for those today, fighting to bend forward the arc of history.
By the Light of Burning Dreams includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert.
By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution Reviews
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Americans have short memories. Our failure to read history leads us to believe that nothing in our past could equal the dangers posed by the crises that threaten us today. We forget those times when the nation’s very existence hung in the balance. 1776, when the American project might well have foundered in its infancy. 1861, when the country shattered into two warring states. 1941, when we entered a global war we could have lost. And 1971. Then, movements for radical change erupted in every corner and 2,500 terrorist bombs went off in the United States. More than 300,000 US military personnel served in Vietnam as the year dawned. And Richard Nixon sat scheming to hold onto power in the White House.
In By the Light of Burning Dreams, David Talbot and Margaret Talbot take us back to that tumultuous time fifty years ago. They trace “the sweeping social and cultural transformations of the 1960s and ’70s”—the second American Revolution.
Movements for radical change raised the hope of millions
“This second revolution,” they write, “forced the country to change its assumptions about race, war and peace, gender, sexual orientation, reproductive rights, labor justice, consumer responsibility, and environmental protection.” It’s a painful story to read because it highlights how sadly incomplete that revolution proved to be. And it brings to mind the ferocity of the Right-Wing reaction that followed later in the 1970s and beyond, setting the stage for the sad state of the American scene today.
A second American Revolution comprising seven interconnected movements for radical change
The Talbot siblings tell their tale by profiling some of the major protagonists of the movement behind that second revolution. A handful of them—Cesar Chavez (1927-93), Tom Hayden (1939-2016), John Lennon (1940-80), Dennis Banks (1937-2017)—are still widely recognizable today. Others are less well remembered. In the seven chapters that follow their introduction, the Talbots successively spotlight some of the most compelling personalities of the 1960s and 70s.” Each chapter,” they write, “focuses on climactic events or turning points in the lives of radical leaders who were driving the” change. Their account encompasses the movements for economic democracy, Black Power, abortion rights, the farmworkers’ struggle, gay liberation, peace, and Native American rights. And they make clear in the telling that these movements often overlapped and interconnected.
Economic democracy
Chapter One highlights Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, and Berkeley’s Red Family, with a focus on the life and work of author and political strategist Tom Hayden. The Talbots’ account rests in large part on an interview with former Red Family leader Anne Weills, now a prominent progressive Oakland attorney. But the story’s all there: the Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society, Hayden’s expulsion from the Red Family, the Chicago Eight, his storied marriage to Jane Fonda, the Campaign for Economic Democracy, and Hayden’s eighteen-year service in the California State Legislature. When historians point to the movements for radical change that roiled the United States half a century ago, they often place the drive for peace and economic democracy at the top of the list.
Black Power
Bobby Seale (1936-), Huey Newton (1942-89), Eldridge Cleaver (1935-98), and the Black Panther Party are the subject of the book’s second chapter. In interviews with Bobby Seale, the authors follow the history of the Black Panther Party from its origins in Oakland in 1965 to its dissolution in 1982. The emphasis in their account is on Seale himself and on Newton and Cleaver, but other prominent figures enter the narrative as well. Among them are Fred Hampton (1948-69), mercilessly gunned down by government agents in Chicago in 1969, and Bobby Hutton (1950-68), shot while surrendering to Oakland police in 1958. Cleaver’s impressive wife, Kathleen Cleaver (1945-) and Ericka Huggins (1948-) also enter the tale. But, throughout, the story keeps returning to Seale, Newton, and Cleaver, who are described as “the heroic realization of [Frantz] Fanon‘s dream, the fusion of lumpen lethality and intellectual prowess.”
Abortion rights
In the third chapter, the spotlight moves to legendary organizer and political strategist Heather Booth (1945-) and her seminal work in advancing the cause of reproductive choice. The authors use the emergence of the Jane Collective that Booth organized in Chicago as the jumping-off point for a discussion of the women’s liberation movement. The effort followed her active involvement beginning in high school in the civil rights movement through the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Booth’s illustrious later career is less well portrayed than Hayden’s. In later years, she has played a pivotal role in the political arena, founding the Midwest Academy and Citizen Action, organizing a massive nationwide African-American voter registration drive, and advising leading Democrats on strategy. Booth is the subject of a documentary film, Heather Booth: Changing the World.
The farmworkers’ struggle
Cesar Chavez (1927-93), Dolores Huerta (1930-), and their partnership in La Causa is the topic of the Talbots’ fourth chapter, which they entitle “The Martyr Complex.” The emphasis throughout is on these two remarkable human beings, but unsurprisingly the authors dwell more on the cinematic Gandhian figure of Chavez. Older readers will remember the hunger strikes, Senator Bobby Kennedy’s well-publicized visit, and the grape boycott of the late 1960s. Most of us are less familiar with the decline of the United Farm Workers union as Chavez placed numerous relatives in key positions, and that episode in Chavez’s life is barely mentioned. But his cofounder, Dolores Huerta, has earned a place for herself in the limelight in the quarter-century that has elapsed since his death. At age 91, she continues to speak out forcefully for social justice.
Gay liberation
In a fifth chapter, the authors advance a perspective on the history of the gay liberation movement that is unfamiliar to most readers. The 1969 Stonewall Rebellion is usually noted as the launching point. But the Talbots reach further back in history and identify New York’s Oscar Wilde Bookshop, established in 1967, as the centerpiece in a struggle that began in the 1950s. In their account, the store’s founder, Craig Rodwell (1940-93), plays a seminal role. Rodwell organized New York City’s first Gay Pride demonstration that has morphed into today’s massive marches involving millions in the movement for LGBTQ rights.
Peace
In the book’s most surprising chapter, the Talbots write about “John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and the Politics of Stardom.” They assert that “with the exception of the movie star Jane Fonda, no popular artists became as associated with the revolutionary uprisings of the time. And no entertainer of John Lennon’s status struck deeper fear and loathing into Richard Nixon’s paranoid presidency and its repressive security machinery.” As the authors note, Lennon and Ono also supplied funds to support others active in the movements for change. But it’s hard to pin down or understand why the couple could be singled out in the company of the leaders of the movements for radical change who are profiled elsewhere here. By comparison, they come across as frivolous and unfocused.
Native American rights
In the book’s final chapter, the center of attention shifts to Dennis Banks, Madonna Thunder Hawk (1940-), Russell Means (1939-2012), and “the Warriors of Wounded Knee.” There, in “the most courageous and sustained Native American uprising in the twentieth century,” the three profiled in this chapter led a force of 200 in a seventy-one day occupation of a site near Wounded Knee Creek. There in South Dakota eighty-three years earlier, the US 7th Cavalry Regiment massacred as many as 300 men, women, and children on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
On a personal note
It was unsettling. I know, or knew, most of the men and women whose names appear in this book. Tom Hayden. Heather Booth. Russell Means. Cesar Chavez. Harvey Milk. And so many others, both major figures and minor. A few were friends, though none of them close. Most were merely acquaintances. A few, such as Dr. King, I’d met in passing. But as I read I felt more and more like Zelig, though I was never in the frame. It was eerie learning new things about people I thought I’d understood as I now observed them through the prism of history. So I owe a note of thanks to David and Margaret Talbot for helping me relive the episodes in my life that had dimmed with the passage of time. I just wish that second revolution had led to legislation that would stand the test of time.
About the authors
David Talbot (1951-) is a journalist and independent historian who has served as a senior editor for Mother Jones magazine and features editor for the San Francisco Examiner. He has written six nonfiction books, of which this is the most recent, as well as numerous articles for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and other periodicals. In 1995, he founded and served as editor-in-chief of the pioneering online magazine, Salon. Talbot’s father and his siblings, including his sister Margaret Talbot, have all achieved distinction.
Margaret Talbot is a staff writer for the The New Yorker and has written for The New Republic,The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly. By the Light of Burning Dreams is her second book. Her first, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century, profiled her and David Talbot’s famous father, a founder of the Screen Actors Guild. The Acknowledgments for this book reveal that Arthur Allen, Margaret’s husband, “wrote the chapter on Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers.” -
This review first appeared on my blog -
https://nsfordwriter.com - on 2nd September 2021.
Essential reading if you want an overview of the civil rights movements in 1960s and 70s America. I would also recommend this book if you watched the film The Trial of the Chicago 7, as it covers some of the same material but in the context of the broader wave of anti-war protests and various liberation movements. This book also caught my eye on the library catalogue because I'd heard of the American Revolution but hadn't previously heard of the 60s and 70s described as the second one.
Although this is a history book, it's written in an accessible, journalistic way and uses a lot of material from interviews and archives to present a well-structured narrative. It filled some gaps in my knowledge; I'm assuming that people my age from the US would know more than I did to begin with, but as a Brit my understanding of the subject was limited to African American civil rights (which I learned about at college), the internet reading I did about the Chicago 7 (or 8) after watching the film, and some knowledge about Stonewall. It goes without saying that I already knew about Martin Luther King from a young age, as we learn about him at school.
People are at the heart of this book. The authors focus on figures such as Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Heather Booth, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Craig Rodwell, John Lennon, Dennis Banks, Madonna Thunder Hawk, and more. Their characters and backgrounds are examined and the way they worked with each other. This is of course a book biased towards these figures as pioneers and supporters of movements which intersected with each other. They clashed with the government and were infiltrated by the FBI. Writing from today's perspective, no other view of the era would be possible. However, the character flaws and the tensions within the groups are laid bare, because they were all human - some of them could be described as heroes for the causes they believed in, but not saints.
If you already have a good knowledge of the civil rights movements, you can still learn something from this book, as the authors have talked to some of the activists who are still around, so the content is up to date and we're seeing the parallels between today's world and the events of 40 to 50 years ago. The book also includes notes, an index and photo section. -
The subtitle pretty much sums it up; "the triumphs and tragedies of the Second American Revolution" i.e. the 60's and 70's. So many inspiring human beings inhabit those pages: everyone from Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden to the Black Panthers, the Women of Jane, Cesar Chavez and La Causa, Craig Rodwell and Pride, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, AIM and the Warriors of Wounded Knee. Incredible visionaries and activists.
David Talbot from the acknowledgements: Their unfinished crusades illuminate our nation's tragedy, and it's hope. By the light of burning dreams. -
a good overview of the turbulent Sixties by a pair of astute siblings. Well researched and well written, tackling Hayden/Fonda, Black Panthers, Women of Jane, United Farm Workers, Craig Russel founder of an early gay bookstore/gathering place, Lennon/Ono and the politics of stardom, and Wounded Knee and the AIM leaders: Dennis Banks, Russel Means and Madonna Thunder Hawk. It sparked memories and informed me of a lot of information that I did not realize.
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"Leadership, Honesty and Trust," Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times, Oct. 20, 2022.
David and Margaret Talbot’s By the Light of Burning Dreams gives us portraits of fourteen or more specific heroes and the movements and crisis points focusing on “climactic events or turning points in the lives” “from this second American Revolution” where their Triumphs and Tragedies occurred. There’s a tremendous amount of overlap in scenes, events and characters among Yippie Girl, The Activist's Media Handbook and Burning Dreams, but each is chronological “non-fiction” from different perspectives, voices and styles.
Gumbo’s “tall, blond, native Californian” “serious revolutionary” friend Anne Weills, for example, shows up as the “paramour” of post-Chicago 7 “flawed leader” and 2917 Ashby Avenue “Red Family” (Gumbo never used that term) resident Tom Hayden in the first chapter, “The Purity of Protest and the Complexity of Politics.” “Radical insurgents who broke into political office in the 1970s” is his category, and the Talbots call his relationship and political partnership with Jane Fonda “one of the most effective political unions in the history of the American Left.” This reflects their interests in cultural changes that brought her to him as antiwar “Hanoi Jane” in 1972 who had just won an Oscar for her performance in Klute.
The Talbots choose to follow heroes or heroic couples in each of their chosen liberation, “Second American Revolution” movements, but I like the way they connect the personal and political lives of their subjects during these periods, with a lot of emphasis on internationals, women and people of color who were vilified, ignored or degraded by the press, government and/or upper classes at the time.
How do the Talbots elucidate both the “Triumphs and Tragedies?” Even “name-dropping” people like Bella Abzug, James Baldwin, Shirley Chisholm, Bobby Seale and Harvey Milk in one paragraph, and many more throughout the book, gives a sense of the marvelous “cast of characters” and political / creative activity swirling around and interconnecting in the period arching the 60s and 70s. But the “tragedies” were certainly there as well. Judy Gumbo and Stew Albert visit her parents in Canada before they marry, but on their way home a flight attendant hands them a Toronto Globe with the headline “14,500 U. S. Soldiers Killed in Vietnam in 1968,” the year Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and riots rocked the country; and both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died in late 1970 as a kind of parenthesis, to say nothing of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Czrchoslovaks, Latin Americans and others in resistance movements and invasions all over the world.
“The civil rights movement – which won its greatest victories in the first half of the 1960s – ignited the second American Revolution.” But like the Founding Fathers of the First Revolution, “the nation fell from the ideals of its hallowed founding documents,” caving in to the demands of traditional racism in “States rights” in the South and corrupt politicians in the north and west. Just as maintaining the African slaves was “The nation’s founding betrayal,” abandonment of the hopes of Native and women’s freedoms continued and followed as well.
The second chapter covers Bobby Seale “politically motivating the community” a s an Oakland, CA Black Panther primarily, but goes deep into Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver’s contrasting militaristic views.
The shadows of J. Edgar Hoover, FBI chief and “secret police commissar” whose “autocratic powers extended throughout ten presidencies” and his “clandestine counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO)” hover over all these persons and movements. “Field agents would be instructed to ‘thwart and disrupt’” parties, individuals and movements, “creating ‘factionalism’ and ‘suspicion’ within…ranks and fomenting ‘opposition’ from the (Black or other) community at large.” Indeed, Gumbo pulls clips from her own FBI files to locate times, places and people throughout Yippie Girl, they are so offensive and diligent in their scrutiny and pursuit of her and Albert's personal and political lives.
“Sisterhood is Blooming” was a revelation to me (then in Milwaukee and Madison, WI) of the Chicago paramedic abortion services of the “Jane” collective, their dedication to “the rights of a woman to her own body, and also her ability to be economically self-sufficient” through abortion and birth control. Heather Booth learned “moral core” and “There are sometimes unjust laws, and you need to stand up to the unjust laws and unjust authorities” in work protecting voters in Mississippi in Freedom Summer 1964, carrying courage back home through the arrest of “The Abortion 7,” being freed on bail and then release after Roe v. Wade federally guaranteed rights to abortion in the first trimester under “right to privacy” in January of 1973.
Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Fred Ross and other United Farm Worker and labor organizers are the subject of “The Martyr Complex,” outlining the grape and lettuce boycotts and Chavez’s fasts leading to his death of a heart attack in 1993. Huerta has continued “fighting the good fight,” “demonstrating for livable wage increases for home care workers” as recently as 2019, at the age of 89.
Craig Rodwell, originator of gay and lesbian bookstores Oscar Wilde and Christopher Street, moved to New York City in 1958 from Chicago. He moved in gay circles and had a long term love affair with Harvey Milk. After depression, a suicide attempt and inspirations of Freedom Summer and Antiwar protests, he began to organize with Philadelphia and other cities' activists to break out of their “deviant” status, wanting to be “out,” legally and openly, in bars controlled by gays rather than the Mafia. The Stonewall Raid June 28, 1969 did not go well for the New York City Vice Squad, however, and the Pride Parade to Central Park’s Sheep Meadow he helped organize the next year fulfilled his lifetime dream of liberation.
“We All Shine On,” the 1968 to 2020 chapter on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s activism combined with their lives as artists, musicians and lovers is the best short portrait of both I’ve ever read. Peace, love and rock and roll; constantly harassed by the FBI, racists, misogynists, psychic and drug-leeches and Beatles-lovers, they persist. With deep stories of their contacts, inspirations and use of their money, celebrity, the media and amazing talent for good in the world, the Talbot’s depiction is stellar. John especially, had “wit, candor and self-deprecating humor about issues that bitterly divided the American people,” and Yoko, an “endless optimist,” balanced Lennon with an urge “to do our best to keep the world floating and not sinking.”
“The Great Escape” chronicles the American Indian Movement, Wounded Knee in 1890 and 1973, Dennis Banks, Russell Means and Madonna Thunder Hawk in their 72-day standoff with Nixon’s, the governor’s and tribal GOONS military barrage. Their triumphs and tragedies inspired not only Native peoples worldwide, but those “living to fight another day” who went to Standing Rock in 2016 with their words and example.
A revolution is a rebellion that replaces a system with a “sudden and momentous change” to another system in cyclical motion (American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition (2016). This is not a political rebellion against government persons and policies only, although the repressive, military-industrial imperialism of the Nixon and Reagan eras and assassinations of progressive change leaders certainly brought that on. The Talbots expand the political context to “the sweeping social and cultural transformation” that would, I would say, inexorably “keep the unfinished work of US democracy alive” to this day.
Written as a well-researched third-person narrative of “this volcanic period,” with many interviews and quotes from subjects, their writings and their friends, families and compatriots of the period, it won a well-deserved Best General Non-Fiction (2021) Award at the Northern California Book Reviewers ceremony September 11th of 2022. -
This was a page turner from the start.
Siblings David and Margaret Talbot put forward a clear and compelling thesis: the American Revolution was (is?!?!) incomplete. When the founders delayed trying to build bridges across the bleeding cracks in the foundation of America in favor of short term order, they undermined that order.
The Talbots argue that progressives and revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s represent a Second American Revolution. One that seeks to deal with America’s settlement cracks not just by plugging them with spackle and covering the work over with paint—but by shining a light ON those cracks, in some cases, causing a total reevaluation of our structures.
For many readers, ironically, this may sound like a pretty modest or tame argument. Of course the liberal movements of the 60s and 70s sought to redress fundamental civic disparities.
For me, however, viewing these movements as extensions of Thomas Paine, the early abolitionists, and colonial business reformers, raises the stakes at risk in each of the book’s thrilling biographies.
That’s the other thing I very much enjoyed: the book’s breadth. Obviously, whenever you’re going for coverage, you might have to make concessions to depth depending upon how much space you have. And that’s true here. Each of these chapter subjects warrant entire studies. But the Talbots hit a near perfect balance between the two; they kept me reading hungrily while also giving me plenty of novel passages to take notes on.
In the list of subjects/biographies below, you’ll see many names with which you’re familiar. Two things though. First, even within these familiar stories—for me, I’ve done quite a bit of reading about the Black Panthers—the Talbots manage to uncover and convey new information, and for the most part, they’re not after hagiography here. For instance, in the aforementioned chapter on the Black Panthers, the authors substantively address how Newton’s mercurialism and Cleaver’s temper, domestic abuse, and struggles with drugs weakened the movements they helped foster. Look, we’re talking about, in David Talbot, one of the founders of Mother Jones. So let’s not pretend that what we’re reading is unbiased. But that’s silly. Everything IS biased; history written by the powerful was—for me—the FIRST history I was taught. To quote Bob Marley (and others), “Half the story has never been told.”
Second, there are many names I DIDN’T know. The chapters on Craig Rodwell, Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Dolores Huerta, and Heather Booth and the Janes are revelatory.
The subjects of the individual chapters are as follows:
Vietnam/Red Scare/Cold War: Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda
Race: Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers
Feminism: Heather Booth and the Women of Jane
Labor Rights: Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and La Causa
Gay Rights: Craig Rodwell and the Oscar Wilde Memorial Book Shop
Stardom and Peace: John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Native American Humanity: Dennis Banks, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Russell Means, and the Warriors of Wounded Knee -
Considering the current environment of me -too , BLM , Social justice warriors, This should be essential reading for high school students to understand how far the country has come and how hard the fight was for some of the equality and justice we have today. It was not that long ago that women, minorities , migrants , had very little power over major life decisions. It is really enlightening to see how the anti war movement tied into many of those freedom and equality issues as well.
Some of the featured leaders the book highlights are Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Heather Booth, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Craig Rodwell, John Lennon, They stood up for the rights of marginalized groups, clashed with the government and were infiltrated by the FBI.
The details and anecdotes in the book bring the humaness and faults of these leaders into focus. Tom Hayden particularly, had to reinvent himself and, with the help of Jane Fonda , made a difference in the politics of the era for years. The Black Panther history has a direct comparison to BLM today, and shows how long their struggle has endured.
I was inspired by how dedicated these leaders were to social justice causes. I hope we are still producing young people with his kind of passion today. -
I won an Uncorrected Proof of By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution by David Talbot and Margaret Talbot from Goodreads.
By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution by David Talbot and Margaret Talbot is an excellent, informative book concerning an important part of our national history that is rarely taught in schools. Broken down into seven chapters that each cover a distinct movement, the authors guide readers to understand the initiation of each movement and the on-going struggles. The topics covered are the anti-war movement of the Vietnam War and the movements for equal rights by Blacks, Women, Laborers, the LGBQT community, and Native Americans. The re is also a chapter dedicated to Human Rights. The authors' writing style makes this book accessible for everyone, including school-aged readers, and this superb resource should be offered in classrooms and libraries throughout the country. -
I so do appreciate this succinct summary of 1970s societal shifts. Each chapter is powerful and historically educational. Tom Hayden, “brilliant New Left strategist.” His association and later marriage with actress Jane Fonda was “one of the most effective political unions in the history of the American left” [p52]. Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, Hewey Newton and their attempts to raise community consciousness and “inspire Black Americans to take political action, not to incite a bloodbath” [p77]. Heather Booth and the Women of Jane that provided stress-free abortions and where “the air crackled with wild ideas” [p134]. Cesar Chavez, whose food fast was a “brilliant act of theater” [p171]. The “Yippies,” who “interjected some much-needed madcap humor into the heavily-browed New Left” [p238]. And the daring escape of Navajo Lenny Foster and co-founder of the American Indian Movement Dennis Banks through the fortified encirclement at the second siege of Wounded Knee. I loved it all!
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I won a copy of this book through Goodreads Giveaways and am voluntarily leaving a review.
This is a thorough and well-written overview of protest movements of the 60s and 70s, and I highly recommend it. It’s entertaining and informative, and I think now more than ever those of us committed to social justice need reminders that this work has been ongoing, has faced successes and setbacks, and that’s a cause for hope rather than despair. There’s real inspiration here, even though some might say “if we’ve been at this so long and we’re still doing it, what’s the point?” The point is that we’re farther along now than we were then, and we’ll get farther still and farther still until we get the world we want. Folks profiles in this book knew that, and did the work, and this helps impress on the reader why they did and why we should too. -
The Talbots run briefly through a sampling of radical politics from the 1960s (including the Black Panthers, abortion activists the Jane Collective, Gay Pride, and the American Indian Movement, among others), briefly capturing the high points of their successes and failures, as well as their intersections. Saddening and inspiring in turn and highly reaadable, a good capsule summary for those interested in the era.
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A fascinating look at the some of the liberation movements of the 60s and 70s, including women's, farmworkers, Black Panthers, gay rights, and a Native rebellion at Wounded Knee. I was coming of age then and was swept up in the times. But the book provided many more details and people than I'd known back then.
One benefit from the book -- it portrayed famous activists realistically, with faults included.
Recommended to anyone interested in those times. -
It’s hard to believe sometimes how much really was going on during the ‘60s and ‘70s. I’ve wanted to believe we’d come a long way since then, but in many ways, it seems we haven’t. Some of the information I already knew, but much I didn’t. Educational, and certainly eye opening, I recommend By the Light of Burning Dreams.
I received a copy of this book for free through Goodreads giveaways. -
This is an important book. I couldn't put it down once I started reading it. While I missed seeing any mention of such leaders as Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem, the portraits of movement leaders, some well-known and others more obscure, were truly complex and fascinating. I came away feeling that we need to keep fighting for human rights, no matter what.
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Great overview of the trials and tribulations of the ongoing civil rights movements that had a huge surge in the 60s and 70s. Well written and enough depth in brevity to entice me to learn more and more... and to continue to be angry for our nation. Worth the read... and the reread... and the sharing with others.
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Captures a good deal of what aging hippies would like to believe was the highlight of the 20th century. Plenty of good stuff to go around if you believe all the missteps of the FBI and other feds (mostly quite justified) as America dealt with progressives in all their outpourings of angst.
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I learned a lot from this book, particularly in the chapters on the Jane Collective and Wounded Knee. The John Lennon chapter, although fascinating, felt like a strange addition. Well-written and engaging!
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I won this in a Goodreads giveaway.
Very interesting recent history. Sadly we are still fighting these battles. -
Engaging episodic take on 1970s history, through deep dives into lesser-known stories.
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This was hard to read because of all of the historical facts that are jam packed into every page. However I learned a lot about of the the movements that came from the Civil Rights era. I was surprised the most about what I didn’t now about John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
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My takeaway quote (Lafayette): "I never would have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived thereby that I was founding a land of slavery."
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Fantastic read! I learned a lot about some personal heroes. I then watched The Trial of the Chicago 7 and saw a number of them in the film (portrayed by actors lol)
