Meltdown Expected

"[An] exquisite and unique history of the late 1970s. Drawing from government files, personal memories, conversations and multiple newspapers and texts, Leonard has composed a concise, thoughtful and important addition to the history of the decades after the 1960s. . . . The history put down in Meltdown Expected goes a long way towards explaining how we arrived at the current debacle we call the present."

- Ron Jacobs (CounterPunch) "Historians correctly remind us that, in the 1960s, America experienced cultural and political turmoil that still resonates nearly six decades later. But in Meltdown Expected, Aaron J. Leonard proves the overlooked point that events during the last years of the 1970s were just as crucial, from Jonestown to Three Mile Island, from the rise of the Religious Right to the growing threat of violence both at home and abroad. I frankly cannot conceive of a more important book for readers who want to truly understand not only how we have gotten to where we are today, but why."
  - Jeff Guinn (author of The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple) "Leonard has produced a fascinating account of an era that is growing quickly away from contemporary public attention. He shows that the world we live in today had not yet taken definitive shape, that the fluidity of social movements still alive from the 1960s, in some ways still growing, had the capacity to enhance democracy but fell toward failure. The power on the other side proved too great. Still, the details offer important clues for what may yet become the dynamos of tomorrow's American promise."
 
  - Paul Buhle (coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left) "In Meltdown Expected, Aaron J. Leonard has crafted a highly readable survey of the upheavals, repressions, disasters, and political and economic transitions that marked the end of the 'Disco Decade' and the segue into the Reagan Era. He’s achieved a rare feat here, presenting those days with a broad sense of disparate yet simultaneous – and momentous – events."
  - Scott Martelle (author of 1932: FDR, Hoover, and the Dawn of a New America)