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The article focuses on the book "For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman," by Jonah Raskin. Raskin's new book is meant to be as much a corrective to a New Left history of the time as a biography of political leader Abbie Hoffman, the wildest of the wildmen. Raskin's book is arranged like a series of filmed calendar pages; behind the pages stand descriptions as vivid as movies of the formative influences moving with lightning speed across those few amazing years while Abbie, and the rhetoric inside him, grew apace.

This article focuses on the book "Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party," written by Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman. This book is Healey's own account of her forty-five years in the Communist Party. It was organized by the historian Maurice Isserman out of thousands of interview hours conducted for the explicit purpose of producing this book. Although she had been born into the movement, and had been in the Young Communist League since the age of 14, it was the California farm labor strikes of the 1930s that made her a Communist.