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

Richardson, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1595584390 ISBN 13: 9781595584397

Publisher: The New Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Publisher:

The rollicking story of Ramparts--the magazine that captured the zeitgeist of the '60s, repeatedly scooped the New York Times, brought the new left into American living rooms, and made an indelible imprint on American journalism

Advance Praise:
"Peter Richardson has done a brilliant job bringing to life the incredible story of Ramparts, a publication that changed journalism and the world it reported on. This book will become required reading for all those concerned about the current crisis in the world of news. A Bomb in Every Issue makes clear that Ramparts in its prime was a vortex of flamboyance and critical intelligence. Out of that maelstrom came reporting that truly changed America. What makes this book even better is that it has not ignored or downplayed the foibles of Ramparts' founders and chief architects. It is a cautionary tale told with economy that will be a touchstone for the new journalism, the new Ramparts of the twenty-first century."
--Lowell Bergman, professor of journalism, University of California, Berkeley, and a correspondent for PBS's Frontline

"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. Ramparts touched the lives of far more people than its readers by paving the way for the rich universe of alternative media now open to us. Peter Richardson has told an important story, and told it well."
--Adam Hochschild, author of Half the Way Home and Bury the Chains

America's muckraking tradition stretches back to the 1690s--but no publication better represented it than Ramparts. In the 1960s, it helped set a generation on fire, tore away a veil of hypocrisy in public life, and set new standards in editorial and design quality. Richardson's tale brings the dead to life, and gives us a new understanding of how journalism changes the way we are and will be."
--Richard Parker, senior fellow, Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Harvard University

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1595584390
• ISBN 13: 9781595584397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272