dies: vietnam and the memory of war. [inaudible conversations] tonight s wisconsin book festival. i m here as a member of the board of the wisconsin humanities council, and it s really a tremendous pleasure to be able to introduce the next speaker and to thank, first of all, the madison public library the library foundation, humanities council, all the other sponsors. this is probably a good time to remind you to check and make sure that your cell phone is silent. everybody reaches for the cell phone immediately. and the book festival is asking people to talk about their experiences using the hashtag wibookit s wi book fest. all one word. books are for sale afterwards out in the, just on the other side of this wall. viet is really a remarkable author. you get people who are accomplished as literary authors and people who are accomplished as nonfiction authors, and hera has actually pulled off major accomplish bements in both accomplishments in both rell are ms in basica
today s panel on the crises of the 1970 s. so we have a great panel today. i am going to just start up i talk a little bit about what how we kind of framed this panel and how we are hoping what we are hoping to accomplish. we have the roundtable intensely. we are each want to speak about 10 minutes. just a few roof remarks about the literature on the 1970 s and thinking about the 1970 s and what this unique time means to us today. and then we would like to open it up for a lot of conversation both with each other and most importantly with the audience. so we will be sticking to a pretty tight time and hopefully having a lot of time for comp for conversation. one of the things we were thinking about was the central role of the idea of crisis in thinking about the 1970 s, both in the contemporary clinical imagination of a time and also in historical scholarship. from watergate to the energy crisis, the urban crisis, a fiscal crisis, the rhetoric of the era is huge with ex