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

by Peter Richardson

Overview

A Mother Jones "Best Book of 2009," A Bomb in Every Issue uncovers the largely untold story of Ramparts magazine, the spectacular San Francisco muckraker that captured the zeitgeist of the '60s and repeatedly scooped the New York Times, changing American journalism forever.

Launched in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly, Ramparts quickly transformed into a "radical slick," winning a George Polk Award in 1967 for its "explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition." According to the Los Angeles Times, the magazine "not only blew the cover off the biggest stories of the era, it also helped set the ideological agenda for its core demographic, the New Left, and forced the mainstream press to follow its lead."

Ramparts' list of contributors—including Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag—formed a who's who of the American left. Although Ramparts folded for good in 1975, former staffers founded Rolling Stone and Mother Jones and include some of the most illustrious names in journalism (names like Robert Scheer, Jann Wenner, and Warren Hinckle), and Ramparts remains an inspiration to investigative journalists today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595584397
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	09/08/2009
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	884,782
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Richardson is the author of A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (The New Press). He is an editor at University of California Press, a lecturer at San Francisco State University, and a book reviewer at Truthdig. He lives in Richmond, 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

"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

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