Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford University Press), by John McMillian

Alternative publications existed long before TheVillage Voice debuted in 1955, but Georgia State University history professor John McMillian is correct to stress the important legacy of 1960s "underground" papers. Smoking Typewriters is a supportive but not uncritical assessment of the era's radical left press. Like the political movement it manifested, the papers were often committed to a loopy democratic ideal that suspected editors and even good writing of elitism and spawned interminable staff meetings and angry schisms. Few '60s underground papers survived long into the '70s, when a more professional raft of alternative weeklies positioned themselves between their militant predecessors and the mainstream media. Alas, most have been absorbed into a faceless media giant and the confrontational stance has migrated to the Internet, where the economics of publishing are irrelevant. In his closing pages McMillian focuses on the "liberal blogosphere," apparently unaware that the right wing has claimed its own share of cyberspace.