Where Have All the Flowers Gone? The Diary of Molly Mackenzie Flaherty, 1968

This book in the Dear America series is basically about the Vietnam War and as such deals with events much closer to present time then do most of the other books in the series.

Molly is a typical young girl caught up in trying to figure out what she believes about the Vietnam War and incredibly worried about her brother, Patrick, who is actually fighting in that war.

It's also a book that in a way is very up-to-date since there are obvious parallels to the Iraq war; a country deeply divided, protests over the war, etc. This level of disagreement easily reaches very nasty levels of name-calling and worse.

There's also numerous references to the music and TV of the sixties, and to the problems with various drugs like LSD and marijuana.

There's also reference made to John Kennedy's assassination and what that meant to the country. The killings continued, of course, with Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, both murders also referred to in the book, along with reference to the riots that took place after Dr. King's assassination.

There are also other things mentioned. Molly gets into trouble in her history class for asking questions that the teacher doesn't really want to answer about Communism. There's even a reference to the budding "women's right's " movement.

As always, there's a historical section added, although I do disagree with the caption given to the photo from Kent State. The caption gives the impression that a student riot led directly into the shots being fired by the National guard , leading to the deaths of four students, although everything else I've ever read about Kent State tends to disagree considerably with that assumption.

In any case, it's still a very well done book and very relevant to our own time.

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