By the Light of Burning Dreams

The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution

By: David Talbot, Margaret Talbot

Narrated by: Soneela Nankani, Leon Nixon

Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

New York Times best-selling author David Talbot and New Yorker journalist Margaret Talbot illuminate “America’s second revolutionary generation” in this gripping history of one of the most dynamic eras of the 20th century - brought to life through seven defining radical moments that offer vibrant parallels and lessons for today.

The political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s was perhaps one of the most tumultuous in this country's history, shaped by the fight for civil rights, women’s liberation, Black power, and the end to the Vietnam War. In many ways, this second American revolution was a belated fulfillment of the betrayed promises of the first, striving to extend the full protections of the Bill of Rights to non-white, non-male, non-elite Americans excluded by the nation’s founders.

Based on exclusive interviews, original documents, and archival research, By the Light of Burning Dreams explores critical moments in the lives of a diverse cast of iconoclastic leaders of the 20th century radical movement: Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; Heather Booth and the Jane Collective, the first underground feminist abortion clinic; Vietnam War peace activists Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda; Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers; Craig Rodwell and the Gay Pride movement; Dennis Banks, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Russell Means and the warriors of Wounded Knee; and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s politics of stardom. Margaret and David Talbot reveal the epiphanies that galvanized these modern revolutionaries and created unexpected connections and alliances between individual movements and across race, class, and gender divides.  

America is still absorbing - and reacting against - the revolutionary forces of this tumultuous period. The change these leaders enacted demanded much of American society and the human imagination. By the Light of Burning Dreams is an immersive and compelling chronicle of seven lighting rods of change and the generation that engraved itself in American narrative - and set the stage for those today, fighting to bend forward the arc of history. 

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook. 

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio. 

©2021 Margaret Talbot and David Talbot (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

Essential for anyone under 60.

These are crucial facts and an important part of 20th-century history, a good 'story' that probably needed to be written. Anyone paying attention to this era, especially anyone from the first wave of the post-war baby boom who was paying attention, will get a return to known facts but little fresh insight.
It is nicely-researched, though the chapters don't weave together as did David Talbot's brilliant Devil's Chessboard. Margeret Talbot is a wonderful writer in her New Yorker essays but I don't get that same pizzazz here. (I also love the book o their father that she wrote)

I do love the progressive approach to this history and sincerely hope it is read by anyone under 60, and certainly under 50. This stuff is essential knowledge. It does bring the facts forward occasionally to compare the impact of the 60's to work being done today.I just needed more meat and less retrod territory that I find elsewhere. For me, the female narrator was close to unbearable. That's when I bailed out.

Don't let that stop you. I think the book should be assigned in schools. They hold back just enough of their progressive politics to make it (hopefully) acceptable by school boards. If I were still teaching, I would try to use it. As a text, the chapters are clear and distinct. Generations that did not experience this world I fear are sadly uninformed about this historical time - a too convenient oversite that has had real-world consequences.

I tried to listen but had to give up. I have ordered the book in hardcover to read quickly but for me, as an audiobook, it didn't work.