The Politics of Upheaval 1935 1936 or Flying Close to the Sun

The Politics of Upheaval, 1935-1936: The Age of Roosevelt (Age of Roosevelt Series), Vol. 3

Author: Arthur M Schlesinger

The Politics of Upheaval, 1935-1936, volume three of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s Age of Roosevelt series, concentrates on the turbulent concluding years of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term. A measure of economic recovery revived political conflict and emboldened FDR's critics to denounce "that man in the White house." To his left were demagogues — Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Dr. Townsend. To his right were the champions of the old order — ex-president Herbert Hoover, the American Liberty League, and the august Supreme Court. For a time, the New Deal seemed to lose its momentum. But in 1935 FDR rallied and produced a legislative record even more impressive than the Hundred Days of 1933 — a set of statutes that transformed the social and economic landscape of American life. In 1936 FDR coasted to reelection on a landslide. Schlesinger has his usual touch with colorful personalities and draws a warmly sympathetic portrait of Alf M. Landon, the Republican candidate of 1936.

Library Journal

While a lot of ink has been spilled profiling FDR, Schlesinger's three-volume work remains among the best efforts. Released in the late 1950s, the trio begins with a broader overview of his early political career and then moves into dissections of far shorter, distinct periods in his ascent to the White House and first term as president. These reprints sport new introductions by the author. Essential for all history and political science collections. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Book review: Control Your Depression or Fun and Games

Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman

Author: Cathy Wilkerson

"Unsparingly maps the idealism, fanaticism, moral absolutism and personal passions that carried her to the town house [explosion]."-The New York Times

"Clear-sighted, self-critical yet unapologetic account."-Los Angeles Times

"You'll want to plunge right into Cathy Wilkerson's Flying Close to the Sun. If you're a 60s survivor (as I am), you'll know it's the real thing."-Carol Brightman, Truthdig

"Flying Close to the Sun is, above all else, a well-written record of Wilkerson's evolving beliefs-a point-by-point memoir of innumerable arguments with herself over political philosophies and innovations."-The Phoenix (Boston)

"At times exciting and at other times refl ective, Flying Close to the Sun is always captivating."-Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch

Flying Close to the Sun is the stunning memoir of a white middle-class girl from Connecticut who became a member of the Weather Underground, one of the most notorious groups of the 1960s. Cathy Wilkerson, who famously escaped the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, here wrestles with the legacy of the movement, at times finding contradictions that many others have avoided: the absence of women's voices, then and in its retelling; the incompetence and the egos; the hundreds of bombs detonated in protest, which caused little loss of life but which were also ineffective in fomenting revolution. In searching for new paradigms for change, Wilkerson asserts with brave humanity and confessional honesty an assessment of her past-of those heady, iconic times-and somehow finds hope andfaith in a world that at times seems to offer neither.

Cathy Wilkerson was active in the civil rights movement, SDS, and the Weather Underground. In 1970, she, along with Kathy Boudin, survived an explosion in the basement of her parents' townhouse that killed three Weathermen, forcing the two underground. For the past twenty years she has worked as an educator.

Duncan Stewart - Library Journal

The last thing that 1960s militants might expect is that 40 years later they would seem quaint. Wilkerson, of the Weathermen Underground terror group, was one of two survivors of an explosion at the group's bomb factory in her father's New York townhouse. Her memoir combines an overview of 1960s radical history with the story of her transition from bourgeois daughter to make-believe Leninist. It can be read several ways-as a personal account of the plunge of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from idealism to the self-satisfied violence of the Weathermen, as a deeply felt autobiography of Wilkerson's struggle to find her way in the world, or as an individual's muddled story, which gives us this history much as readers may know it already from such books as Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rageor James Miller's Democracy Is in the Streets. Wilkerson's writing conveys the urgency of the time as well as the 1960s slogan that all politics is personal. Most interesting is the account of the budding women's liberation movement and the resistance that "radical" men showed to it. Recommended for academic libraries and larger public libraries.

Table of Contents:

Introduction     11
New England Soil     15
North American Roots     37
Discovering the World     53
The Limits of Electoral Politics     101
New Left Notes     109
Washington SDS     145
1968     181
The Question of Power     251
Weatherman     275
The Explosion     355
The Underground Years     359
Reentry     389
Afterword     399
Chronology of Weatherman Bombings     405
Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins     406
Bibliography     415
Notes     437
Acknowledgments     429
Index     437