Pictures From a Revolution — Now You Can Read the True Stories
We won many battles of the second American Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s. But we didn’t win the war. And a younger generation of radicals must now learn from our triumphs and tragedies. That’s the message of my new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams, coauthored with my sister Margaret Talbot. This will be my last history book – they are mountains of labor that require increasingly too much of you. But in some ways, this is my most readable effort – not only because I cowrote it with a wonderful writer, but because the stories of the revolutionary heroes of the ’60s and ‘70s are so damn riveting.
These dramas from our radical past are usually told in corny ways (see Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 – or better yet, DON’T see it). Or this revolutionary history is rendered in censorious and scornful fashion. But the profiles of the legendary figures in By the Light of Burning Dreams are starkly honest while ultimately inspirational. These are the true stories of America’s second revolution that the nation must absorb before we can advance to the next historical stage.
The book will be published in June by HarperCollins – and you can get a free copy by being one of the first ten to donate $50 to the David Talbot Show.
I won’t be publishing excerpts of the book, but here’s Part One of a photo gallery of the men and women who “star” in By the Light of Burning Dreams. I’ll run Part Two tomorrow. (The collection of photos in the book is even more striking, and many pictures have never been published before.)
Tom Hayden was disowned twice in his youth, as I write in the chapter about the New Left’s most talented strategist – once by his father and then by the New Left itself. But he reinvented himself as an antiwar leader with his partner Jane Fonda, and their efforts helped finally cut off U.S. funding for the Vietnam war. Hayden latter demonstrated how to take “movement” values into the electoral mainstream, while Fonda overcame a Hollywood blacklist to make popular movies with progressive themes.
Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, the cofounders of the Black Panther Party, were the dynamos of Black Power, arming themselves to resist the violent repression of police departments and the FBI. Seale’s and Newton’s first hair-trigger confrontation with the notorious Oakland police is still a pulse-pounding scene – and Bobby narrated every fraught moment for me.
I also conducted a long and deeply revealing interview with Kathleen Cleaver, one of the savvy women who played a leading role in the Black Panther Party.
Feminism was once a dangerous enterprise, and nobody took more risks than the Jane collective in Chicago, an underground group of women who performed abortions before they were legalized by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling. The members of Jane put their freedom on the line so women could win control of their bodies and selves.
Act now, as the TV ads say – Join the David Talbot Show with a $50 donation and get a free copy of this eye-popping American history you’ll never see on PBS. And come back tomorrow for Part Two of the photo gallery.