Love and War at Kent State - Paperback

by Jon Michael Miller (Author)

Dr. Jerry M. Lewis, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Kent State University writes: "On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University students, killing four and wounding nine. This action contributed to the first nationwide student strike in higher education in the United States. 'Love and War at Kent State' by Jon Michael Miller relives the two and one-half year period from the Fall of 1967 to mid-May of 1970. Miller tells the story of the protest as well as the shootings through the experiences of a passionate love story of Jake Ernst, a graduate student in English, and Tasha Van Sollis, a French teacher in the local high school. As Jake struggles with personal relationships, he becomes involved in student protest against the Vietnam War. As a teaching assistant, he becomes a faculty marshal at various protests. He encounters the May 4 shootings in that role. Miller has told a creative and important story of the protest culture at Kent State. Readers of this novel will imagine themselves walking on the Commons area thinking about protest and the Vietnam War, and what these important events have meant to the United States."

Author Biography

Jon Michael Miller, author of stories, novels, and a memoir, was a student at Ohio State University when the May 4 shootings at Kent State occurred. Ohio State had its own protest problems causing a campus shutdown. Thankfully no one was killed there. The Kent State shootings have haunted Miller ever since, however. Though the events have been studied, viewpoints aired, testimony given, conclusions proposed, we still struggle with questions of responsibility and justice. "Love and War at Kent State" offers a contemporaneous vantage point of campus events as they built through the months with no vision of what was about to happen that dreadful and lovely spring day on the Kent State campus. All other renditions the author knows about present the drama from hindsight, not as they began, simmered, boiled, and exploded in mayhem and death. Miller's novel presents such an imaginative vision of what many have seen as the climactic day of the national Vietnam protest movement.