Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best account of Chicago '68, March 24, 2000
The events in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention vividly displayed the social divisions and conflicts of the Sixties. Thus it's an event that can serve as an entryway into understanding the period.No one book can do justice to Chicago '68, but this one comes the closest. John Schultz takes you inside the International Amphitheatre where the convention was taking place as well as into the parks and onto the streets where the protests were. He captures the nightly confrontations at curfew time in Lincoln Park with cinematic clarity. Schultz's narrative sticks close to the street action, close to the acts of demonstrators, rather than the activities of the soon-to-be-famous so-called leaders. Read this to sense the full-bodied flavor of Convention Week 1968. Lots of books on the Sixties are steeped in nostalgia and never cut through the foggy mists of time. This one is the original article, it will show you what it was to be there.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good read and timely, September 2, 2004
With protesters at the Republican National Convention reviving the practice of civil disobedience in September 2004, it might be time to relive a portion of our past where those tactics were regularly used.
"No One Was Killed" is one of the better reads about the week-long protests and police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago that produced the famous "Chicago 7" trial of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others.
The aura of that time is strongly captured by John Schultz, who paintakingly used historic records to recreate the events of that tumultuous week in "Boss" Richard Daley's Chicago.
One excerpt from the book captures an event that other books on the subject missed. At one point during the week, Hoffman led a group of protesters down a closed alley, where they became trapped by a wall on one end and Chicago cops & National Guard troops on the other.
Schultz compares it to a similar event that occurred during a protest in Mexico, where the government troops shot and killed the marchers. Thus, the title "No One Was Killed", an ironic twist on one of the bloodiest political campaigns in American history.
If you like history, politics or radicalism, or you have nostalgia about the 1960s, you will enjoy this book. I read it as a protester in the 1970s and it fueled my passion. It may or may not do that today but it will help you understand how something called the "generation gap" unglued America during the 1960s in what many of us then called the Second American Revolution.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Revisiting the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention police riots, March 3, 2008
A new film released this week entitled "Chicago 10" is generating nationwide interest in the police riots against protesters which took place during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. John Schultz's eye-witness account of what happened is not only a gripping description of what he saw--the gassing and bashing of kids, hippies, yippies, and new left radicals by the police--but also a perceptive analysis of why Mayor Daly and top police authorities who ordered the violence were never held accountable for the savegery they unleashed.
Schultz also shares with us the feelings and attitudes of Chicagoans who didn't participate in the protest marches but wanted to understand why the police unleashed wholesale violence again the marchers. "The middle class...wanted to find out that either the kids did not provoke the cops and the cops were unconscionable bullies,or that the kids were irredeemable anarchists. Their minds were not capable of coping with the fact that the cops were unconscionable bullies, and the kids did provoke them." We also learn that many of the protesters were free agents improvising as they went along, not the puppets of Yippie leaders who attempted unsuccessfully to organize them and were later tried for inciting the riots. "They tried to sing 'We Shall Overcome,' but it was a dead issue for these kids who regard violence as just another flicker of the serpent's tongue."
Schultz was gassed and clubbed on numerous occasions and points out that the police acted like wild men even after the worst of an evening's violence had concluded. "The cops stormed into improvised hospitals--such as the Church Federation on Michigan Avenue--and jerked transfusion needles out of arms and, broken bones or no broken bones, crammed the wounded into vans."
This is a disturbing, exciting, perceptive and beautifully written book. Schultz explains why the police correctly believed they would get away with their brutal behavior, and how their arrogance radicalized many of those who participated in the marches, including dozens of journalists and cameramen who were beaten. Hopefully this account of the Chicago police riots has prevented and will continue to prevent similair outrages from taking place in other American cities when citizens hold rallies and protest marches.
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