Thirty Years' War: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994

The ``greatest radical journalist of his time,'' to Alexander Cockburn, Kopkind (1935-1994) left his 1960s Time-track for a career of ``authenticity and integrity,'' writing for publications such as the New York Review of Books, Ramparts and the Nation. Though few essays in this weighty compendium, all of which have appeared previously, may attain canonical status, Kopkind is reliably sharp in wit and judgment. His reports from the civil rights and Black Power era echo with mournful prescience about today's unfinished business, as does his skepticism about the willingness of 1960s liberals to challenge corporate power. By the 1970s, he was evolving, coming out as gay, increasingly inserting himself into his reports, charting zeitgeist questions such as those of gentrification, disco and drugs. Perhaps his most resonant writing concerns gay life, from his 1979 piece on inexorable liberation to his 1993 essay on gay entrenchment. In recent years, he remained a beacon of the left, a prominent Jesse Jackson supporter and a solid skeptic of Clintonism. Despite a few silly lines--``There's no substantial difference between other repressive regimes and ours,'' he wrote after the Chicago 7 trial--Kopkind's is a voice to be savored, and his presence will be missed. Wypijewski is managing editor of the Nation. (June)