Crisis; A Contemporary Reader

xi, [1], 387, [1] pages. Occasional footnotes. Cover has some wear and soiling. Name in ink on fep. The work is organized in the following sections: Black and White--Together, Rites of Passage, Culture and Anarchy, and A State of the Nation. Among the contributor are Norman Podhoretz, Kenneth B. Clark, Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, Bruno Betteheim, Jack Newfield, Philip Roth, Henry Steele Commager, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and William Styron! Peter Anthony Dale Collier (June 2, 1939 - November 1, 2019) was an American writer and publisher. He was the founding publisher of conservative Encounter Books in California and held that position from 1998 until he resigned in 2005. With David Horowitz, Collier wrote many books that made The New York Times Best Seller list and was described by the New York Times Book Review as "the premier biographer of American dynastic tragedy." His book Medal of Honor: Profiles of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty (2003) profiled living recipients of the Medal. Collier was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966 when he became an editor at Ramparts magazine, the publication that was influential in transmitting New Left ideas into the mainstream. Collier wrote about the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement and other radical organizations for Ramparts. He and fellow Ramparts writer David Horowitz became disillusioned when the New Left turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the communist victors in Southeast Asia—the tiger cages and boat people in South Vietnam, the genocide in Cambodia. Crisis contains twenty-eight essays and four stories about America at the time this was written. The portrait of American society that it presents is not traditional, and perhaps it is even a little asymmetrical and jagged at the edges. However, the book is not meant to be history or sociology. Rather it is an impression of a culture in crisis. Each of the sections ends with a short story, which both summaries and gives an imaginative dimension to the dialogue of that section.…