Volume 11, Number 8 · November 7, 1968
Notes from a Plague Year
By Margot Hentoff
Bound For Glory
by Woody Guthrie
Dutton, 430 pp., $6.95
Daybreak
by Joan Baez
Dial, 159 pp., $3.95
Beginnings are always the best of times. Looking back now at the past eight years one realizes that what sometimes appeared to be apocalyptic vision was, in fact, an extraordinary optimism, an uncommon belief in the possibility of radical enlightened change—if not immediately in our institutions, then certainly in the people; a kind of neo-populist faith first in the blacks and then in the young as the instruments of purification, the trustees of a new morality. It is painful to recall that, only last spring, some of us were inordinately dismayed at the prospect of being forced to settle for Robert Kennedy as President rather than McCarthy. How ingenuous that dismay seems now. It appeared, then, that the years of direct action had paid off; that the peace marchers, the demonstrators, the black liberation movement, the draft resisters had caused a government to fall. It was a time in which anything could happen. It now looks as if everything will.
Review, 1648 words
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