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A Mother Jones "Best Book of 2009," A Bomb in Every Issue uncovers the largely untold story of Ramparts magazine, the spectacular San Francisco muckraker that captured the zeitgeist of the '60s and repeatedly scooped the New York Times, changing American journalism forever. Launched in 1962 as a Catholic literary quarterly, Ramparts quickly transformed into a "radical slick," winning a George Polk Award in 1967 for its "explosive revival of the great muckraking tradition." According to the Los Angeles Times, the magazine "not only blew the cover off the biggest stories of the era, it also helped set the ideological agenda for its core demographic, the New Left, and forced the mainstream press to follow its lead." Ramparts' list of contributors-including Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag-formed a who's who of the American left. Although Ramparts folded for good in 1975, former staffers founded Rolling Stone and Mother Jones and include some of the most illustrious names in journalism (names like Robert Scheer, Jann Wenner, and Warren Hinckle), and Ramparts remains an inspiration to investigative journalists today

Like Mark Twain, Hunter S. Thompson arrived in San Francisco as an obscure journalist, thrived on the city's anarchic energies, and departed as a national figure. His literary formation played out in San Francisco during what he called ''a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again.'' That peak helped Thompson invent not only Gonzo journalism, but also himself. This article traces Thompson's literary formation with special attention to three editors--Carey McWilliams, Warren Hinckle, and Jann Wenner--who helped transform Thompson into what he described as "one of the best writers currently using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon."

The main features of the Grateful Dead's long-term project were formed, in utero as it were, by 1958. This was Jerry Garcia's annus mirabilis, the twelve short months between his fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays. During this blessed interval, he received his first guitar, smoked his first joint, took courses at the California School of Fine Arts, and read Jack Kerouac's On the Road. By themselves, none of these events counts for much. Many baby boomers had similar experiences, and most haven't been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But when we set these experiences against the larger cultural forces that were sweeping through San Francisco at the time, and when we consider their profound effect on Jerome John Garcia, they help us understand not only the Dead's interest in ecstasy, mobility, and community, but also the source of the band's sustained appeal.

The period since the close of World War II has been agonizingly introspective--not least because of the pain of reassessing Christianity's attitude to Judaism. The early Christian materials have often been examined to assess their role in the long-standing negative attitude of Christians to Jews. The motivation for the early church's sometimes harsh attitude was partly theological--it needed to define itself over against its parent--and partly sociological--it needed to make clear the line that divided the fledgling group of Christian believers fromt he group with which it was most likely to be c