[Excerpt] Was the New Left a premature revolution, the fruits of which must await a future set of proper conditions to develop? Or was it more a victim of a giant government conspiracy that crushed a vibrant and growing oppositional tendency? Adherents of these and similar interpretations thus can explain the demise of the New Left while protecting its image as a tribune of a people in inevitable, if slow, political motion. But a perspective less protective of the New Left might reveal more. Perhaps treatments of that era have never fully captured either the complex turnings of America's political and religious history or the complete portrait of dissident youth during and after that decade. The importance of John A. Andrew's recent book, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics, is that he attempts to understand how the new, different world of the quarter-century since 1970 in fact emerged from, if not the ashes, then the fissures of the old.