VIRTUAL DERF

Monday, September 14, 2020 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm

Derf will do a Facebook Live presentation about his new graphic novel Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio on Monday, September 14th at 7 p.m. on Mac's Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/macs.coventry/

Special signed (with a drawing) copies are available by ordering using the link below.

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. In a deadly barrage of 67 shots, 4 students were killed and 9 shot and wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children—a shocking event burned into our national memory. A few days prior, 10-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same Guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike. Using the journalism skills he employed on My Friend Dahmer and Trashed, Backderf has conducted extensive interviews and research to explore the lives of these four young people and the events of those four days in May, when the country seemed on the brink of tearing apart. Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, which will be published in time for the 50th anniversary of the tragedy, is a moving and troubling story about the bitter price of dissent—as relevant today as it was in 1970.

"Derf Backderf's masterful Kent State does what really good, in-depth journalism should always do--breathe life into cold, hard facts--but in this case, with searing, memorable images, drawings that put us inside the skin of the protagonists. The students and the soldiers are all tragic figures in this telling, and Backderf lets us decide how to judge them. The final, violent scenes are almost Goyaesque in their brutal reality. You don't simply put this book down and get on with your life after reading the final page--you slowly recover, shaken from the experience."-- "Bill Griffith, author of Zippy the Pinhead, Invisible Ink, and Nobody's Fool"

 

Event address: 
Books: 
Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio By Derf Backderf Cover Image
$24.99
ISBN: 9781419734847
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Harry N. Abrams - September 8th, 2020