On may 4, 1970, the National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Ohio. In a deadly barrage of sixty-seven shots, four students were killed and nine wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children—a shocking event burned into our national memory. A few days prior, ten-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same Guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike.
Using the journalism skills he employed on My Friend Dahmer and Trashed, Backderf has conducted extensive interviews and research to explore the lives of these four young people and the events of those four days in May, when the country seemed on the brink of tearing itself apart. Kent State : Four Dead in Ohio, published in time for the 50th anniversary of the tragedy, is a moving and troubling story about the bitter cost of dissent—as relevant today as it was in 1970.
