A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America

Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a lively history," A Bomb in Every Issue uncovers the largely untold story of Ramparts magazine, the spectacular San Francisco muckraker that captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s, repeatedly scooped the New York Times, and changed American journalism forever.

With "jaunty prose" and "delightful anecdotes" (Chicago Sun-Times), Richardson depicts Ramparts from its inception in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly to its rise as a "radical slick," which won a George Polk Award in 1967 for its "explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition."

Ramparts's list of contributors-including Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag-formed a who's who of the American left and although Ramparts folded for good in 1975, it left an important legacy. Former staffers founded Rolling Stone and Mother Jones and include some of the most illustrious names in journalism, including Robert Scheer, Jann Wenner, and Warren Hinckle.

Ramparts' combination of high audacity and solid reporting deeply influenced a generation of progressive writers-and remains an inspiration to investigative journalists today.