At mid-day on May 4, 1970, after three days of protests, several thousand students and the Ohio National Guard faced off at opposite ends of the grassy campus Commons at Kent State University. Just after noon, the Guard moved out. Twenty-five minutes later, Guardsmen launched a 13-second, 67-shot barrage that left four students dead and nine wounded, one of them paralyzed for life. The story doesn't end there though. A far greater tragedy was narrowly averted minutes later when the Guard and students reassembled on the Commons.

Using the university's recently available oral history collection, Howard Means delivers a book that tracks events still shrouded in misunderstanding, positions them in the context of a tumultuous era in American history, and shows how the shootings reverberate still in our national life.