Another Positive CHOICE Review: For Insider Histories, Part 2

It’s never happened to me before but I’m delighted that it did: Positive (okay, actually glowing) reviews two months in a row in CHOICE. Last month they reviewed Michael “Mica” Kindman’s story, My Odyssey through the Underground Press, which is volume 2 in the Voices from the Underground Series. This one is for Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 2, which is volume 3.

Readers of popular journals may not be familiar with CHOICE but it is a key decision maker for librarians purchasing books for their libraries. I’m grateful to them for permission to reprint it here. It appears in the September 2012 issue. While it contains a few errors, they are minor and do not detract from the overall importance of the review.

This volume joins the series’ first volume (reprinted in 2011) and includes another interesting diverse sampling of underground newspapers that existed during the Vietnam War period. Examples include The Ally (an American GI newspaper), the Eugene AUGER [sic] (focusing on the antiwar movement), The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, The Furies Collective [sic] (a Washington, DC-based feminist and lesbian newspaper), It Aint Me Babe (the first national newspaper of the Women’s Liberation Movement), The Kudzu (a Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper published by the Southern Student Organizing Committee, affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society), and New Age (an underground workers newspaper), among others. There are also background stories and firsthand tellings that complement the content of volume 1, from Fag Rag (a Boston-based underground newspaper that was part of the Gay Liberation Front press) and The Fifth Estate (out of Detroit). The book features illustrations, including staff working and pictorial collages. Required reading for those interested in the underground press or this era in the US, this book directs attention to and provides missed voices in scholarship of this period in history. Summing Up: Essential. All readers.—M. Goldsmith, Nicholls State University (Reprinted with permission from CHOICE http://www.cro2.org,  copyright by the American Library Association. )

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