Little Red

January 7, 2013
Veteran journalist Hampton profiles three alumni of New York’s politically progressive Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School: Angela Davis, the African-American philosopher and radical; Tom Hurwitz, a leader of the 1968 Columbia University student revolt; and Elliot Abrams, the neoconservative thinker. In her whirlwind tour of the era, a chapter on Hurwitz details his involvement in the 1967 “Summer of Love” in San Francisco, contact with anarchists on the Lower East Side, and participation in a documentary on the anti-Vietnam War march on Washington that fall. Hampton writes most about Davis, including accounts of then Gov. Ronald Reagan’s attempt to fire her for her political views shortly after she began teaching in the UC system, and her trial and acquittal for allegedly aiding Soledad Brother George Jackson. Abrams, former assistant secretary of human rights, who supported repressive regimes in Latin America and was indicted for his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, gets the least attention. Though Hampton could have provided more background on educational, social, and political dynamics during these decades, this fast-paced, engaging book provides a fascinating look at how these personalities navigated an era of upheaval. Agent: Dunlow, Carlson & Learner Literary Agency.

January 15, 2013
Parallel biographies of three notorious 1960s graduates of a left-wing New York high school. The Little Red School House, in Greenwich Village, was founded in 1932 by committed leftists and expanded into the Elisabeth Irwin High School 10 years later. In her debut, journalist and "Little Red" alumna Hampton traces the lives of three of the high school's graduates: Angela Davis, '61, and Tom Hurwitz and Elliott Abrams, both '65. In the early '60s, the school hewed to an old-left, Marxist line, to which these three students responded very differently. Davis, who entered in her junior year after living in segregated Birmingham, found classic communism a revelation to which she has steadfastly clung. Hurwitz, instrumental in the seizure of buildings at Columbia University by Students for a Democratic Society and later in the GIs Against the Vietnam War movement, chafed under the old thinking and reveled in the frenetic activity of the New Left--until he found himself on the receiving end of some Maoist criticism and was ejected from a California collective for being insufficiently revolutionary. Abrams began his political odyssey as a Humphrey liberal and ended as a prominent neoconservative, brought down by the Iran-Contra scandal and still widely vilified by other alumni. Hampton ably maintains an evenhanded respect for her subjects' widely varying political positions as she explores their evolution over the years, but it is her narrative skills that truly shine. Her evocation of the heady, impulsive spirit of the university-building-occupation era, awash in drugs, sex and over-the-top Marxist rhetoric, is pitch-perfect. Davis' arrest and 1972 trial for murder in the death of a California judge are presented as a gripping courtroom thriller, counterbalanced later by the inexorable pursuit of Abrams by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. A capable and compelling memoir of the '60s and its varied political legacies as reflected in the lives of three survivors.

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February 1, 2013
The Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York's Greenwich Village is famous for its progressive education methods and left-wing politics and for launching into the world some of America's best-known radicals. Journalist Hampton focuses on three Little Red graduates who went on to become major figures of the 1960s: Angela Davis, the iconic face of black nationalism; Tom Hurwitz, the filmmaker who, as an SDS activist, was a key figure in the student occupation of Columbia University; and Elliott Abrams, who rebelled against Harvard's left-wing student groups and served in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. Hampton alternates in chronicling the separate but similar paths Davis, Hurwitz, and Abrams took from their days at Little Red of learning to challenge orthodoxy through the tumultuous 1960s of student protests against the war and for civil rights and women's rights to the more current issues of Iran Contra and, lately, Occupy Wall Street. Through their personal and career ups and downs, Hampton charts the development of three persons who continue to influence the American political landscape.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)