Wednesday evening at 8 PM on KPFK, 90.7 FM in Los Angeles. Students of Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964 will read my guest Bruce Watson’s singularly comprehensive and definitive history of that campaign and be affirmed in their appreciation of it as a moment of consequence and sacrifice, provocation and redemption in America’s political story. But they --- including highly politicized Bibliocracy and KPFK listeners --- will frankly be delighted at Watson’s generous, engaging retelling of the story, and at the details and personal life stories in this revisionist appreciation and, yes, thoughtful analysis. Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy, offers in its title alone Watson’s own clear, brave thesis about the efforts by young SNCC volunteers to take on not just a state, but the history of our brave, flawed republic. Writer, historian, journalist Bruce Watson is a hero of mine, for this book and for his previous, Sacco and Vanzetti, a finalist for the Edgar Award and Bread and Roses, a New York Public Library Book to Remember. About the new book, Howard Zinn wrote, “The best account I have seen of Freedom Summer.” Don’t miss the one. Next week: KPFK Fall 2010 Fund Drive. Please support Bibliocracy, a singular books show. Support KPFK, the singular voice of alternative community media in Southern California. Thanks!
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