From Library Journal
This well-written volume is a complement to Joseph P. Lyford's The Berkeley Archipelago (LJ 5/1/83). It is exceptionally well researched, and the detailed footnotes, etc ., will make it useful to local and period scholars. The book's four chapters focus on separate elements (e.g., students, blacks, etc.) in the Berkeley, California, community's admixture of culture and politics. The elements overlapped when the new University of California President, Clark Kerr, fueled a protest movement when he failed to define academic free speech policy. People's Park, Telegraph Hill, and other city sites became skirmish scenes as radicals gained control of community politics; liberals, the university; and conservatives, the state government. Berkeley's politics sent Ron Dellums to Congress, but also sent Ronald Reagan to the White House. Recommended.
- James L. Jablonowski, Marquette Univ., MilwaukeeCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"Accessible and stiulating."--Perry Blatz, Duquesne University
"Thorough and engaging popular history."--New York Newsday
"A skillful researcher who also possesses a vigorous narrative style, Rorabaugh brings scholarly clarity to the turmoil of the mid- to late-1960's."--Publisher's Weekly
"Evocative and smoothly written....A compelling story of politics and power, silliness and cynicism, ideology and idiosyncrasies....Rorabaugh catches the temper of the times....He leads deftly from boardroom to classroom, coffeehouse to crash pad, in a perceptive and evenhanded Baedeker to a turbulent era."--Kirkus Reviews
"[Rorabaugh's] meticulous account brings back those years, while showing how little most of us really knew about the forces setthing around us then....The book conveys many vivid images of a unique city as well as provides an authoritative account of an era. The significance of Berkeley at War lies in the fact that Berkeley was a quintessential American city of the 1960s--and those times still shape our world today."--The Seattle Times
"Rorabaugh narrates the events and identifies the issues that swirled into headlines and newscasts as the disenfranchised sought to get their messages and their cases before the general public. The success and outcome of that power struggle are authoritatively assessed in this detailed chronicle of a watershed moment in American society's development."--Booklist
"A welcome addition to literature about the sixties....Can help readers better understand both Berkeley in the 1960s and our contemporary historical circumstances as well. It is a book about the past, but also one very much about the present. With it...we will be able to place our own lives in context, in proper perspective."--The Stanford Daily
"A sober and absorbing chronicle of the transformation of a university town into a political battlefield."--Indochina Chronology
"Excellent....A unique, well-balanced, and solidly researched study."--Perspective
"Excellent....A unique, well-balanced, and solidly researched study that will be of interest to scholars and laypersons interested in the turbulent decade that now lies twenty years in the past but that still strongly reverberates in the consciousness of all who lived through it."--Perspective
