Careless or dyslexic browsers might easily look at the bright red title of Tom Bates’s book, which he calls “A True Story of the End of the Sixties,” and instead of “Rads” read “Reds.” But an epic, even of Warren Beatty’s standard, this is not. A mock epic would be nearer the mark. For the contrast between reds and rads, between real revolutionaries and those who only played at revolution, is implicit throughout. Bates has given us not only “the end of the sixties”—when radicals in Madison, Wisconsin, and elsewhere were sobered up by the death of a young physicist in a political bombing—but also the beginning of the era that has succeeded them, our own, which has been playing at politics ever since.

Bates’s hero is Karl Armstrong, who, although he was a former student at the university, did not fit the radical profile—which was one reason that it took so long to catch him. He was of the working class and a native Madisonian, not a pampered son of the middle class, high on his first taste of independence. But, like Caliban who took a drunkard for his god, he admired those who were and fell in love with their easy, self-indulgent way of living, rather as, mutatis mutandis, the young Evelyn Waugh fell in love with the dissolute aristocratic style at Oxford. “Though he was not doing well in his studies,” writes Bates, “he was not ready to give up the student lifestyle.”