Seth Rosenfeld: Subversives: FBI's War on Student Radicals & Reagan's Rise to Power

"Subversives will shock even those who've become used to the national security state and its excesses. ...Seth Rosenfeld restores the California tradition of courageous muckraking of Lincoln Steffens, and the sharp indictment of the powerful that we associate with Jack London." - Ishmael Reed

In the mid-1960's, the F.B.I. was secretly involved with three iconic figures... Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal university president Clark Kerr. Subversives traces these converging narratives, creating a dramatic and disturbing story of FBI surveillance, illegal break-ins, infiltration, planted news stories, poison-pen letters, and secret detention lists - all centered on the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. Rosenfeld vividly evokes the Berkeley of that era- its rising counterculture animated by the civil rights movement, antiwar protests, such literary lights as Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and Gary Snyder, plus rock-n-roll and drugs galore.

"Subversives is more than a documentary history-it has the insight that comes only with relentless reporting." -Lowell Bergman, investigative journalist for The New York Times and Frontline

Seth Rosenfeld was for many years an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle where his article about the Free Speech Movement won seven national awards. His articles have won the George Polk Award and many other major journalism awards, plus a special citation from Harvard University's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Richard Wolinsky is a veteran host and producer of Cover to Cover, Bookwaves on KPFA.

$12 advance tickets:: 800-838-3006 or Pegasus Books (3 locations), Marcus Books, Mrs. Dalloway's, Moe's Books, Walden Pond, DIESEL a Bookstore. SF: Modern Times ($15 door) Info: http://www.kpfa.org/events KPFA benefit