"'A Lot Has Changed in the Past Ten to Fifteen Years'"

"Other moral panics in recent history—around comic books, Satanism, and marijuana, for instance—fell by the wayside after they became so unhinged that reasonable people turned away.  But the Sensitivity Era appears far from over. The unavoidable takeaway from Szetela's sharply-etched and powerfully argued book is that left-wing illiberalism has been institutionalized. It's already deeply entrenched in schools, libraries, literary agencies, and publishing houses."

John McMillan at The Dispatch reviews Adam Szetela's That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing.

"Consistency Was Not Their Strong Suit"

"It is also true, however, that the Replacements actively cultivated their reputations for bratty insouciance. 'Westerberg would say, as a cockeyed boast … that there wasn't a drivers license or a high school diploma among them,' Mehr writes. Wracked by self-doubt and substance abuse, they often seemed incapable of letting themselves catch a break. The group finally had a chance of earning greater mainstream success in the summer of 1989, when they landed a coveted spot opening for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but they botched that opportunity as well, performing lackadaisically nearly every night. When the tour reached Nashville, Paul announced from the stage, 'Tom Petty says if we fuck up one more time we're fired. Well, fuck you Tom Petty, and fuck you Nashville.'"

John McMillian at Creative Loafing reviews Bob Mehr's Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements.

"Timely, Provocative, and Stylishly Written"

"If 'there goes the neighborhood' sounds like a familiar lament, that’s because disillusioned iconoclasts have been saying it for years. Meanwhile, St. Marks has withstood a rare degree of cultural and socioeconomic heterogeneity. Danger and discord have remained a part of the street's distinctive character, even as it has occasionally welcomed more mainstream interlopers, among them Calhoun's family. She wryly dedicates the book to her parents, the former actress Brooke Alderson and the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, 'who looked upon the apocalyptic 1970s East Village and thought, What a great place to raise a kid.'"

John McMillian in The Atlantic reviews Ada Calhoun's St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street.

"The Beatles Were Thugs Who Were Put Across as Nice Blokes, and the Rolling Stones Were Gentlemen Who Were Made into Thugs"

"While carefully allowing for mutual respect and admiration between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he reveals that the competition between the perennial 'toppermost of the poppermost' and their scruffier, sleazier runners-up motivated the Stones to match the success of pop’s lads from Liverpool, who were then driven to keep ahead of those equally calculating London blues-rockers, during much of the ‘60s. McMillian examines the creation of the marketing images for both groups, and he demonstrates how they were both, despite denials by members, complicit in their Fab Four models and thug five poses."

John L. Murphy at PopMatters reviews John McMillian's Beatles vs. Stones.

As does Tyler McMahon in Salon.

And Newsweek publishes an excerpt.

"Satan From Suburbia"

"Norman convincingly portrays the Stones’ flamboyant lead singer not as a Dionysian character, but rather as a largely happy, well-adjusted, and risk-averse man. The Dartford-born son of a Phys Ed instructor and a hairdresser, Michael Jagger was the product of a loving and stable family, and in 1961 he even got himself admitted to the prestigious London School of Economics (at a time when only about two percent of British high school students moved on to universities). Temperamentally even-keeled, and occasionally kinder than his reputation would imply, he nowadays runs the Rolling Stones like one would a corporation, and he has done so—wisely and practically—since the mid ’70s. As his longtime assistant Shirley Arnold remarked, he simply 'has no dark side.'"

John McMillian in The New Republic reviews Philip Norman's Mick Jagger.

"Always Saw a Blank Piece of Paper, However Small, as a Challenge"

"The quirks of Lennon’s prose style were evident from an early age. He was given to mazy wordplay, absurdist humor and nonsense verse, often supplemented by marginal drawings. By age 12 or 13, he’d started drawing his own handmade newspaper (today we’d call it a zine), 'The Daily Howl,' which owed a fair share of its humor to the BBC radio program The Goon Show. In 1958, when John was 18, he made an adorable, modernist-flavored Christmas card for his girlfriend (later first wife) Cynthia Powell. '… I love you forever and ever isn’t it great? I love you like GUITARS,' he writes. In another letter to Cyn, he says he wishes he were on his way to her flat 'with the Sunday papers and choccies and a throbber.' (By 'choccies' he meant chocolate; a 'throbber,' Mr. Davies helpfully explains, is another word for a boner.)"

John McMillian in The New York Observer reviews Hunter Davies's The John Lennon Letters.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun

"No doubt the tendency to remember Lennon in this way arises, at least in part, from a desire to underscore the tragedy and senselessness of his death. The idea that John Lennon, a man who stood for peace, was gunned down by a lunatic certainly makes for a powerful narrative. For many baby boomers, his assassination was a generation-shattering event (all the more so because it came about a month after Ronald Reagan was elected president)."

John McMillian in The Boston Globe criticizes the image of John Lennon as a pacifist.

The Professor of History Should Also Be a Historical Protagonist?

"The liabilities of this subjectivist approach became clear in the 1980s and 1990s, as 'alternative' became a marketing technique employed to sell commodities that also were supposed to 'speak to' personal identity, and radical historians grew little closer to understanding their opposition. In the Age of Reagan the movement was never stronger in personnel, nor weaker in ideological achievement. Alan Brinkley, writing in the American Historical Review in 1994, faulted the movement for its formulas of commitment. 'New Left scholarship, which attacked the consensus with great effectiveness for ignoring or marginalizing the Left, had relatively little to say about the Right. That was in part because of the way much of the New Left celebrated, even romanticized, "the people." Having repudiated the liberal suspicion of "mass politics" and embraced instead the concept of "participatory democracy," scholars of the Left had difficulty conceding that mass movements could be anything but democratic and progressive.'"

John Summers in The New Republic reviews Carl Mirra's The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970.

Carl Mirra and Staughton Lynd respond, and John Summers answers back.

Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen "Anti-War Students"?

"Every campus has its left-wing organizers, but today the gauzy idealism that circulated among teenagers in the 1960s seems almost freakishly anomalous. According to a recent U.S. Census report, 79 percent of college freshmen in 1970 said that 'developing a meaningful philosophy of life' was among their goals, whereas only 36 percent said becoming wealthy was a high priority. By contrast, in 2005, 75 percent of incoming students listed 'being very well off financially' among their chief aims."

In a 2007 Washington Post article, John McMillian offers answers as to why young people today are not protesting the Iraq War.

It Stinks!

"Almost all of the songs on this album come in the band’s signature funk-punk style, which no longer seems particularly novel. Incidentally, last summer I briefly dated a woman who said she used to make out with Anthony Kiedis. Disgusting."

Columbia University's own John McMillian is one of three "citizen critics" reviewing the latest CD releases for New York magazine.