HURRICANE STREET

Kovic’s impassioned, timely memoir about the American Veterans Movement picks up where Born on the Fourth of July leaves off.

In the spring of 1974, as the last American troops were being pulled out of Vietnam, Ron Kovic and a crew of other severelly infured veterans in a California VA hospital launched the American Veterans Movement. In a phenomenal feat of political organizing, Kovic corralled his fellow AVM members to staging a sit-in, and then a hunger strike, in the Los Angeles office of Senator Alan Cranston, demanding better treatment of injured and disabled veterans.

This was a short-lived and chaotic but ultimately successful movement to improve the deplorable conditions in VA hospitals across the country. Hurricane Street is their story— one that resonates deeply today—told by Kovic in the passionate and brutally honest style that led to over one million sales of Born on the Fourth of July.

Ron Kovic served two tours of duty during the Vietnam War. He was paralyzed from his chest down in combat in 1968 and has been in a wheelchair ever since. Kovic has been one of the leading antiwar and human rights advocates since the 1970s, and has amassed a litany of political, literary, and celebrity allies. Along with Oliver Stone, Kovic was the coscreenwriter of the 1989 Academy Award–winning film based on Kovic’s best-selling memoir Born on the Fourth of July (starring Tom Cruise as Kovic).