The Fire This Time; America's Year of Crisis

New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1969. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very Good/Good. 191, [1] pages. DJ is in a plastic sleeve and has some wear and soiling. Includes Introduction, Select Bibliography, and Index, as well as chapters on The Politics of Uncertainty; Spring has Sprung; Another Lost Generation; A New Kind of Ball Game; A War About Peace; The Background: Wasps Still Sting; A Message from Our Sponsors; Miami to Chicago; and How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Main Street. As a Journalist, Mr. Hastings has tried everything from parachuting to steeplejacking. He has traveled throughout Europe and has also spent a year in America as a Fellow of the World Press Institute. The Fire This Time was written by Max Hastings to tell his English countrymen about the many disturbing events he witnessed and the attitudes he observed during a year's residence in the United States. Only 22 at the time of its writing, Mr. Hastings' book may well prove of even greater value to American readers who will find it an objective mirror of their society and its problems as perceived by an alert, impartial reporter and spokesman for today's youth. It is an unusual and provocative study, notable for its lucidity and vigor, and the work of an extremely able and articulate journalist. Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings FRSL FRHistS (born 28 December 1945) is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard. He is also the author of numerous books, chiefly on defence matters, which have won several major awards. Hastings moved to the United States, spending a year (1967-68) as a Fellow of the World Press Institute, following which he published his first book, America, 1968: The Fire This Time, an account of the US in its tumultuous election year. He became a foreign correspondent and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC1's Twenty-Four Hours current affairs programme and for the Evening Standard in London. Hastings was the first journalist to enter Port Stanley during the 1982 Falklands War. After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he returned to the Evening Standard as editor in 1996 until his retirement in 2002. Hastings was appointed Knight Bachelor in the 2002 Birthday Honours for services to journalism. He was elected a member of the political dining society known as The Other Club in 1993. He has presented historical documentaries for the BBC and is the author of many books, including Bomber Command, which earned the Somerset Maugham Award for non-fiction in 1980. Both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year prize. He was named Journalist of the Year and Reporter of the Year at the 1982 British Press Awards, and Editor of the Year in 1988. In 2010 he received the Royal United Services Institute's Westminster Medal for his "lifelong contribution to military literature", and the same year the Edgar Wallace Award from the London Press Club. In 2012, he was awarded the US$100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award, a lifetime achievement award for military writing, which includes an honorarium, citation and medallion, sponsored by the Chicago-based Tawani Foundation. Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the Royal Historical Society.