I don’t recommend going into this book without some preexisting knowledge of the events. Once you get into the rhythm, and give up on distinguishing between all the characters, the tension builds super effectively up to the shootings. ( )

This was so well told. It was well researched and seems accurate. The only thing I wish was a bit different was that it was a bit more clear who we were following at times. But this didn’t detract from the book enough to warrant any star demotion. ( )

Another great book about Kent State. Very informational. The B&W drawings were well done and stressed the gravity of the situation. Sometimes it was a bit wordy on the pages but over all it was one that should be in the library collection. ( )

A graphic novel of the 1970 protests and shootings on the Kent State campus.
I knew •of• the Kent State incident but despite living in Ohio off and on for 20+ years, I'd never known the details until now, so I'm happy to have read this to get a better sense of what happened. It's a nicely structured account, although be warned that Backderf doesn't do much to hide his opinions on who was in the wrong (I agree with him, but it still reads a little more slanted than an objective account should, so if that's what you'd rather have you won't find it here). Also, I really don't like this illustration style. It's...ugly? And maybe that's partly the point, but my brain just doesn't cotton to it. ( )

Kent State is an event that I've always been vaguely aware of, but I don't remember it being given too much attention during any history class I took in school. There is so much US history to cover (not to mention all the other world history that's happened before and since) that glossing over a fairly recent event like this is almost understandable. That's unfortunate, though, because not only were the aftershocks of this event huge (changes to how law enforcement approach crowd control during protests; the cover-up, investigation, and warring opinions about the events and who was at fault), but the Kent State massacre is probably more relevant than ever before considering the protests going on in the US over the past few years.

At some point in the recent past I read the Wikipedia pages for the Kent State shootings and the four victims who were killed that day. It seemed like a good, unsentimental overview at the time, but the way the events are presented here in this book go above and beyond the facts in a good way. Spending some time with each victim in the days leading up to the massacre, seeing their friendships and relationships, watching them go to work and school and to parties, and following the events, beliefs, and choices that led them to be near the Prentice Hall parking lot on May 4, 1970, was compelling. Seeing all of the political conflict, covert government dealings/misunderstandings, and flat out foolish mistakes that led to violence occurring on that day was heartbreaking. Over the course of the book all of these elements combined into a mounting sense of dread that is ultimately only a fraction of what the protesters, bystander students, their families, and the whole country that watched felt during and after Kent State. Derf Beckderf did a wonderfully effective job of laying out a lot of important information in a compassionate way.

I don't know why I felt the need to write a whole long review for this book, but I'm glad to know a little more about the Kent State shootings than I did before. Unfortunately, the US is probably always going to experience political unrest of some sort. There will probably always be unhappy citizens making their opinions known via protests, some of them violent but many of them peaceful (frustrated, but peaceful). Reading this in light of the protests we've seen over the past year, for BLM and stopping AAPI hate and other important topics, hits hard, but it also made me feel a little worse: history repeats itself if you don't learn from it, and I'm not sure enough people learned from this to stop the repetition. ( )