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

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__...

A Bomb in Every Issue recounts the rise and fall of Ramparts magazine, which, for nearly a decade in the 1960s, was the nation’s premier leftist publication, combining radical content, sophisticated design, and public relations savvy to shape political journalism for a generation. Featuring interviews with David Horowitz, Peter Collier, Adam Hochschild, Christopher Hitchens, Todd Gitlin, Robert Scheer, Warren Hinckle, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Seymour Hersh, William F. Buckley, Noam Chomsky, Brit Hume, Bobby Seale, Howard Zinn, and others, A Bomb in Every Issue situates the magazine amidst student movements in Berkeley, the rise and fall of the Black Panthers in Oakland, and the acid-inflected Summer of Love in San Francisco while assessing the magazine’s impact on national media and politics.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

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.

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. Narrates the wild ride of the spectacular San Francisco muckraker that captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s, repeatedly scooped the New York Times, and changed American journalism forever. Launched in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly, Ramparts quickly morphed into a radical slick, winning a George Polk Award in 1967 for its explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition. One of its articles led Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the Vietnam War for the first time, and the magazine unsettled mainstream America by publishing the diaries of Eldridge Cleaver and Che Guevara. Ramparts' list of contributors--including Noam Chomsky, Cesar Chavez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag--formed a who's who of the American left. But the magazine's enemies were equally formidable--the CIA spied on the Ramparts staff after the magazine exposed the agency's covert activities in Vietnam. Although Ramparts folded for good in 1975, it left an important legacy.--From publisher description 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 ...