Dina Hampton does something unique in writing about the history, meaning and legacy of the 1960s in the United States. She gives us intimate portraits of three very different people whose lives were forged in the red hot political cauldron of that era: the Communist Party champion of Black Power, Angela Davis; the New Left firebrand, Tom Hurwitz; and the neo-conservative advocate of unbridled American power, Elliott Abrams. Her three subjects, fascinatingly, all attended at the same time the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School, collectively known as Little Red.

Going away to college is one the defining moments in anyone’s life, and for Scags Morgenstern, the heroine of Deborah Emin’s Scags at 18, her first semester at an elite Vermont college, where she’s a scholarship student, shifts her world.

Told in the first person as diary entries, Scags’ first semester expresses the questioning and discovery that comes with growing into adulthood.

I wish that headline was in any way hyperbolic. And this comes out of a five-year study, not a quick answer to deflect criticism. This is the formal opinion of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.