Is the world ready for an oversized, illustrated history of famous 1960s political firebrand Jerry Rubin? San Francisco music producer and journalist Pat Thomas (Listen, Whitey) thinks so. Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie is a collage of the political and cultural ambience and artifacts of the '60s. If Rubin, who died in 1994, is best known for his affiliation with radical Abbie Hoffman, Thomas makes it clear that Rubin was the more refined of the pair. Hoffman and Rubin were the Cheech and Chong of the politically active, protest-marching side of the decade's youth movement. They formed the Youth International Party, targeting what Rubin called "the Marxist acidhead, the psychedelic Bolshevik." The Yippies made their name with the 1968 Festival of Life gathering during the Democratic Party convention in Chicago. With the violence that ensued and the arrest of Rubin, Hoffman and their fellow "Chicago Eight," American political history took a decisive turn.
Thomas scatters his text with hundreds of archival photos, journals, manifestos and broadsides from the era. He also includes quotations from participants in the political furor of the times and musicians like Dylan, Lennon and Ochs who created its soundtrack. He includes excerpts from books by the likes of Norman Mailer and Eldridge Cleaver, as well as Hoffman's Steal This Book and Rubin's own Do It! From Rubin's roots in a family of Jewish merchants and truck drivers in Cincinnati to his later years as a stockbroker and New Age spokesman, Thomas tells the complicated history of a man who made a revolution and then struggled to find his place in its aftermath. Did It! is not just the Jerry Rubin story--it's an epochal picture of an entire generation. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.