More than a half century has passed since Ohio National Guard members opened fire on college students during a war protest at Kent State University, killing four students and injuring nine others.

The description of the nation, then split over the Vietnam War, leading up to the 1970 tragedy echo today’s politics and divisions in many ways. In “Kent State: An American Tragedy,” historian Brian VanDeMark recounts a country that had split into two warring camps that would not and could not understand each other.

“It was a tense, suspicious and combustible atmosphere that required only a spark to ignite a tragedy,” VanDeMark writes.

VanDeMark succeeds at helping readers understand that atmosphere, creating a chilling narrative of the spark and ensuing tragedy at Kent State. Within less than 13 seconds, 30 guardsmen fired 67 shots at protesters in an event where “the Vietnam War came home and the Sixties came to an end,” he writes.

With a straightforward writing style, VanDeMark provides both a micro and macro look at the events leading up to the massacre — examining the growing dissent against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and how it rippled across Kent State’s campus.

VanDeMark relies on a host of new material, including interviews with some of the guardsmen, to reconstruct the protests on campus and the shooting. He also recounts the investigations and legal fights that ensued following the shooting.

“Kent State” portrays a campus that grappled for years with its legacy, with no official memorial to the slain students erected on campus until two decades later, in 1990. A new visitors center devoted to the shooting that opened in 2012 suggested an emerging consensus about the tragedy, writes VanDeMark, whose work may contribute to that consensus as well. — Andrew DeMillo, Associated Press

His talents in full flower and basking in public admiration, gonzo journalist and inveterate anti-establishment troublemaker Barrett Brown is jailed in his native Texas on various federal felony charges.

It is 2013, and Brown’s adventures have included helping anonymous hacktivists publicly expose private U.S. intelligence contractors engaged in deep-state power abuses.

Brown has done this in swashbuckling style — often in a drug- altered state, chatting with executives whose hacked emails have been dumped online while on opiate maintenance medication. Brown was in withdrawal from antidepressants and opioids, he would later testify, when he threatened an FBI agent in a video posted to YouTube.

“I wanted to become famous for overthrowing things,” Brown writes in his memoir, “My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous.”

Mainstream press coverage at the time of Brown’s prosecution was uneven, and sometimes just plain inaccurate. Beyond seeking to set the record straight, the book snapshots a pivotal moment in online activism and pulls no punches.

Brown is a showman, a gifted writer in the tradition of William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. He also has a knack for self-sabotage and has struggled with heroin addiction and depression. He is currently in Britain engaged in a legal struggle for political asylum.

A self-described “anarchist revolutionary with a lust for insurgency,” Brown became a cause celebre of press freedom champions a decade ago, a hero of stick-it-to-the-man radicals. But this is far from a happily-ever-after story. Having alienated many who once held him in high esteem, Brown attempted suicide in 2022, alerting the world on Twitter.

The memoir’s last chapter was difficult to pen. “I was deeply wounded by much of what I discovered about the last decade when it became my job to see all this completely and accurately,” he writes. — Frank Bajak, Associated Press