The Thirty Years' Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist 1965-1994 - Hardcover

Kopkind, Andrew; Wypijewski, Joann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859849024 ISBN 13: 9781859849026

Publisher: Verso, 1995

Synopsis

This volume represents the 30 years‘ aftershocks of the cataclysmic battles of the 1960s, as recorded by one of the major journalists of that generation. A chronicle of political and cultural life from 1965 until Andrew Kopkind‘s death in October of 1994, it tracks the black civil rights movement, the New Left, Prague in the wake of Soviet invasion and Moscow during the Soviet collapse, Woodstock, drug wars, blue-collar attitudes, Christian soldiers and gay soldiers. As a gay man, Kopkind understood that there is no pure realm of the personal, and his writing captures history as it happened.

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Reviews

The "greatest radical journalist of his time," to Alexander Cockburn, Kopkind (1935-1994) left his 1960s Time-track for a career of "authenticity and integrity," writing for publications such as the New York Review of Books, Ramparts and the Nation. Though few essays in this weighty compendium, all of which have appeared previously, may attain canonical status, Kopkind is reliably sharp in wit and judgment. His reports from the civil rights and Black Power era echo with mournful prescience about today's unfinished business, as does his skepticism about the willingness of 1960s liberals to challenge corporate power. By the 1970s, he was evolving, coming out as gay, increasingly inserting himself into his reports, charting zeitgeist questions such as those of gentrification, disco and drugs. Perhaps his most resonant writing concerns gay life, from his 1979 piece on inexorable liberation to his 1993 essay on gay entrenchment. In recent years, he remained a beacon of the left, a prominent Jesse Jackson supporter and a solid skeptic of Clintonism. Despite a few silly lines?"There's no substantial difference between other repressive regimes and ours," he wrote after the Chicago 7 trial?Kopkind's is a voice to be savored, and his presence will be missed. Wypijewski is managing editor of the Nation.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1859849024
• ISBN 13: 9781859849026
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 558
• Editor: Wypijewski Joann