Thirty Years' Wars

JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer and editor based in New York. From 1982 to 2000, she was an editor at the Nation magazine. She has written for the magazine, as well as for Harper's, CounterPunch, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and other publications. She is on the editorial committee of the New Left Review. She was the co-editor with Kevin Alexander Gray and Jeffrey St. Clair, of Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence. Andrew Kopkind was born in 1935, the only child of a Republican father and a mildly social­ist mother. He studied philosophy at Cornell, earned a graduate degree from the London School of Economics and seemed to be on his way as a comfortable fifties' era journalist - for The Washington Post, then Time - when history intervened. As a writer for The New Republic in the mid-sixties, he introduced the SNCC work­ers of the South and the SDS organizers of the North to a national liberal audience. He became US correspondent to the New Statesman, wrote famously uncompromising essays for The New York Review of Books and was a founder of Mayday (later Hard Times), a newsletter that both shaped and was shaped by the radical poli­tics of the era.

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.