Reviewed by B. Lynn Goodwin
Posted on: July 21, 2026
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Remember 1969? It’s the year that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and President Nixon took office and implemented “Vietnamization.” If it’s a year when you were in your teens or twenties, you may want to compare your experiences to those of the narrator in Linda Kass’s World News from Waverley High.
Lena Rosen, a junior at Waverley High, is a journalism student and associated editor of The Beacon. She’s also in Mr. Gordon’s Current History class where students talk about the news in each week’s issue of Time. We get to read some of those voices in the pages of The Beacon, written in classic typewriter font and two columns, taking me back to a previous way of looking at the world and the news of another time of turmoil in the United States.
Month by month we read of the personal and political turmoil that Lena faces, and we observe her reactions. At a September football game, Lena’s uplifted by the crowd and says, “There’s only one thing that’s enthralled us in this moment. It’s freeing us, making us one voice.” Though Lena doesn’t realize she’s discovering her purpose in the second sentence, readers suspect what the character doesn’t know.
On New Year’s she tells herself, “I don’t know what to say right now. Jack seems equally tongue-tied.” Does that evoke memories of a high school moment for you, no matter what year you attended?
The song titles, names of musicians, and the specific moments of that history-filled year will take you back. “What a salve music can be,” the author says, and she’s right. I turn up Sirius radio when those blasts from the past come on.
In 1969 I was a college sophomore, somewhat cowed by parental expectations and fearful about my future in a world that didn’t care for women who were 20 pounds overweight. The book reminds me of who I was and who I had not yet become.
Skilled author Linda Kass builds the pace with the fervor of events that happened in the spring of 1970. Her reporter’s background pays off in this story and the research is amazing.
Read for the moments and stories it triggers in your own memory. Read it to remember and compare. Read it to see how far we’ve come and remember the world before cell phones and texting. If you’re reading this review, you can probably relate.
