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1974: A Personal History – A Memoir of the Pentagon Papers and Political Activism
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About This Book
The first memoir from critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose, about the close relationship she developed with activist Anthony Russo, one of the men who leaked the Pentagon Papers--and the year when our country changed During her twenties, Francine Prose lived in San Francisco, where she began an intense and strange relationship with Tony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. The narrative is framed around the nights she spent with Russo driving manically around San Francisco, listening to his stories--and the disturbing and dramatic end of that relationship in New York. What happens to them mirrors the events and preoccupations of that historical moment: the Vietnam war, drugs, women's liberation, the Patty Hearst kidnapping. At once heartfelt and ironic, funny and sad, personal and political, 1974 provides an insightful look at how Francine Prose became a writer and artist during a time when the country, too, was shaping its identity.
Reviews
"Prose's talents should recognize that there is more than a bit of vanity in these salvific impulses."
"Prose skillfully interweaves the political and the personal elements of this watershed time ..."
"Prose brings a sharp lens to her shortcomings ..."
"Often reads like a heady film noir set amid the ashes of '60s idealism ..."
"Prose is too good a writer to pretend Tony somehow changed her life and offered her a pathway toward some sort of transcendence."
"This material is the least successful."
"Deeply felt and devastatingly confessional, this brave personal reckoning isn't easy to forget."
"Employ[s] a temporal layering that mimics thought."
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