Synopses & Reviews
First published in 1979 and long out of print,
The Tribes of America is an overlooked classica prescient and deeply empathetic work based on seven years of reporting from the front lines of the culture wars that continue to divide America. Long before Tom Frank asked, ”Whats the matter with Kansas?”
Village Voice reporter and civil rights activist Paul Cowan set out to to cross the sound barrier of dogma and test [his] beliefs against the realities of American life” by investigating what he called the professional, religious, ethnic, and racial tribesthe Tribes of America.” From reporting on a vicious battle over school textbooks in West Virginia, the school busing crisis in Boston, and the miners strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, to the fight over low-income housing in Forest Hills, Queens, and the 1972 conspiracy trial of Eqbal Ahmad, Father Philip Berrigan, and others, Cowan journeyed deep into misunderstood communities across the nation to depict American struggles, prejudices, and hopes.
In his introduction, Rick Perlstein writes that Cowans agonized sensitivity to battlefields then barely emergent makes for one of the most remarkable books I have ever read by any journalist.” The Tribes of America is a powerful model for engaged journalism and an enormously illuminating portrait of a nation at war with itself.
About the Author
Paul Cowan (1940-88) was a longtime reporter for the Village Voice and the author of The Making of an Un-American, Only Yesterday, An Orphan in History, and, with Rachel Cowan, Mixed Blessings and A Torah Is Written. Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.