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By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution
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66
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
70/100Critics
61/100Scholars
Author:
David Talbot, Margaret Talbot
Publisher:
Harper
Date:
June 8, 2021
The founder of Salon and a writer for The New Yorker explore the 1960s and 1970s through the framework of a second American Revolution, focusing on the era's radical political movements and their leaders, including Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, Heather Booth of the Jane Collective abortion clinic, Vietnam War peace activists Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, among others.
What The Reviewers Say
Taken as a whole, these engaging profiles suggest that revolutions are rarely a one-time deal.
How should we balance the accomplishments of the New Left with its failure to build a sturdy rival to the cautious liberals and confident neoliberals who have dominated the past half-century of U.S. politics and governance? David Talbot and Margaret Talbot, siblings and veteran journalists, have crafted a book of personal narratives rich with the kinds of details that might help answer such queries.
In these self-contained accounts, the authors clearly admire the courage, political savvy, and sheer physical effort required to create and then sustain such critical movements, but they’re also unsparing in saying that mistakes were made.
Through sharp reporting and good storytelling, the authors enliven a journalistic genre that in less skilled hands might have gone flat.
