"The Thirty Years' Wars reveals its author to be not just a great radical journalist but a major repository of that enduring American ideal Walt Whitman called the "Democratic Vista" ... Shifting through the culture around him with infinite patience, Kopkind does precisely what a radical democrat in hard times should: He nudges us towards clarity."
-Los Angeles Times
"Andrew Kopkind had a great talent for describing the political moods and emotions of the moment. Even now, his old dispatches crackle with the chatoic, breakneck energies of the late 1960s."
-New York Times
"... probably no better record exists of these landmark events than the vivid reflections collected in The Thirty Years' Wars."
-Washington Post
"One of the clearest, most courageous voices in American radical journalism."
-Guardian
"Kopkind's dispatches are politically engaged journalism at its best, enlivened by his playful wit and abiding humanity."
-Out
"Kopkind commands extraordinary grace and vision - and an extraordinary ability to delight and rile at the same moment. Shelve this collection next to the best writings of I.F. Stone and H.L. Mencken in that great library of books that torment the comfortable."
-Kirkus Review
Andrew Kopkind eschewed a career as a mainstream journalist to cover the upheaval of the 1960s for the New Republic, New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Mayday (later Hard Times), a radical newsletter of which he was co-founder. With John Scagliotti, he produced "Lavender Hour," the first gay and lesbian variety program on American commercial radio. In 1982 he joined the Nation, where he was an associate editor and the senior political writer until his death from cancer in 1994.
Excerpt
As the trial drew to a close, spirits seemed to pick up. The press, which had been treating the case perfunctorily for months, suddenly regained interest. In the long middle of the case, reporters were satisfied simply to fill the requirements of their editors for a daily story. They fixed on a set of conventional categories into which each session's events were placed: the "antics" of the defendants, the weirdness of the judge, the freak-outs of the spectators and the frustration of the defense lawyers. Bobby Seale's moments made the front page, and the silenced songs of Phil Ochs, Country Joe and Judy Collins were good for a few laughs, but most of the time the stories were buried. It was hard for the real importance of the trial to be broadcast.