... [a] short, very potent primer on four groups of people usually left out of the general hallelujahs for the Greatest Generation.

Gaines provides engrossing character studies of people both well-known and more obscure.

... enlightening, powerful and intimate.

The book isn't really 'An Underground History' Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rachel Carson, Norbert Wiener and other individuals featured by Gaines were public figures in the '50s—and many 21st-century Americans are familiar with them. Gaines maintains, not always persuasively, that in the 1950s Black women (like Pauli Murray) were 'pioneers of a vigorous postwar feminism.' And that Black World War II veterans (like Evers, Robert Williams and Kennard) believed 'nonviolence without the support of armed resistance to racist violence amounted to surrender'.

... revelatory.

... an engrossing deep dive into the personal histories of important figures of what he calls “the long fifties” (roughly 1945–63); many of the book’s subjects have been overlooked in conventional histories.

Historian Gaines...delivers a compassionate and insightful group portrait.

Drawing on histories, memoirs, reportage, and government documents, the author creates a vigorous group biography of several feisty individuals who risked isolation and censure by advocating for systemic change.