A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America

by Peter Richardson

Overview

A Bomb in Every Issue recounts the rise and fall of Ramparts magazine, which, for nearly a decade in the 1960s, was the nation's premier leftist publication, combining radical content, sophisticated design, and public relations savvy to shape political journalism for a generation. Featuring interviews with David Horowitz, Peter Collier, Adam Hochschild, Christopher Hitchens, Todd Gitlin, Robert Scheer, Warren Hinckle, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Seymour Hersh, William F. Buckley, Noam Chomsky, Brit Hume, Bobby Seale, Howard Zinn, and others, A Bomb in Every Issue situates the magazine amidst student movements in Berkeley, the rise and fall of the Black Panthers in Oakland, and the acid-inflected Summer of Love in San Francisco while assessing the magazine's impact on national media and politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595585462
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	11/30/2010
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Peter Richardson is editorial director at PoliPointPress, chair of the California Studies Association, and a lecturer at San Francisco State University. His publications include American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams and numerous essays on literature, language, politics, and media. He lives in Marin County, California.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Dawn's Early Light 9

2 When Our Cause It Is Just 19

3 The Perilous Fight 42

4 When Freemen Shall Stand 68

5 The Havoc of War 87

6 Bombs Bursting in Air 114

7 The Battle's Confusion 132

8 The War's Desolation 152

9 Twilight's Last Gleaming 178

10 Full Glory Reflected 195

After Ramparts 211

Acknowledgments 217

Notes 219

Sources 229

Index 235

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This book satisfies on every level . . .”
—New York Times Book Review

“Short, explosive, unforgotten: the story of Ramparts magazine and its lingering influence long after it was gone.”
—L.A. Times

“Peter Richardson . . . charts the publications’ high points with a gleam in his eye.”
—New York Times

Editorial Reviews

Ramparts stands with a handful of 20th-century American magazines—Playboy, the Harold Hayes-era Esquire, Rolling Stone, Spy and Wiredwhose glory days continue to influence editors. Each of these magazines not only grabbed the zeitgeist but shaped it. If you've never heard of Ramparts or have only vague awareness of its significance, Peter Richardson's compact history, A Bomb in Every Issue, will assure you of its place in the magazine pantheon…This book satisfies on every level and whets the appetite for a big, fat Ramparts anthology.
—The New York Times Book Review

Jack Shafer

Peter Richardson, in his appealing if choppy new book, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America, charts the publication's high points with a gleam in his eye…Publishers should declare a moratorium on subtitles that include any variant of the phrase "Changed America." But Mr. Richardson does give a strong sense of Ramparts' impact on its era, and of its lingering influence.
—The New York Times

Dwight Garner

"It's a great delight to see this key chapter in the history of American journalism at last get the readable, judicious history it deserves." —Adam Hochschild, author of Half the Way Home and Bury the Chains

"Richardson tells Ramparts' story in jaunty prose . . . with delightful anecdotes." —Chicago Sun-Times

"Richardson has peppered his account with lively comments, most of them from reporters who cut their eyeteeth in newspapers long before the 1960s." —San Francisco Chronicle

"An excellent history that shouldn't be ignored." —Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior

From the Publisher