Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Paul Cronin, editor. A Time to Stir: Columbia ’68.

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 123; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/123.3.897

1937-5239

Jeremy Varon,

Communism, Protests, Social Movements

In the conclusion of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 (1953), the protagonist Montag flees his dismal job burning books forbidden by the state to join the rebel Book People. With literature and philosophy banned, the Book People become living embodiments of masterworks, with each memorizing a whole title so that it may survive. Montag is assigned Ecclesiastes from the Old Testament. If historical episodes had similar devotees, Paul Cronin would be one. Cronin has dedicated more than a decade to plumbing the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University, both as a documentary filmmaker and as a doctoral student at Columbia. He has filmed a staggering seven hundred interviews with veterans of the uprising and compiled more than thirty thousand photographs. His marathon film (A Time to Stir [2018]), screened as part of Columbia’s fiftieth-year commemoration of the protests, clocks in at seven hours. In print, the culmination of Cronin’s labors is the luminous edited volume A Time to Stir: Columbia ’68.