After retiring from a long career as Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel, William J. Bowe started thinking and writing about several of the strange periods he lived and worked through in the years since his graduation from law school. While the five stories in this collection are very different from one another, together they all tend to reflect some of the larger historical forces that define their periods. The title of the book Riots & Rockets is taken from the first story and comes from the Vietnam War era. During that fraught time, while cities burned amid racial unrest, would-be revolutionaries plotted and bombed. As an Army counterintelligence analyst at the Pentagon, he found himself assessing this tinderbox and keeping track of a former classmate turned domestic terrorist. Separately he probed espionage and sabotage threats to the country’s first anti-ballistic missile system. As a political activist, he later worked to unseat Chicago boss Richard J. Daley. As a lawyer, he represented one of America’s richest scions and fought for a historic news organization before arriving at an unlikely adventure. Musty old Encyclopaedia Britannica pioneered the multimedia search system ─ a keystone of the internet ─ and Bowe’s job was to shepherd this invention to fruition. All these stories are about battles won and lost in an America upended and range in time from the political upheavals of the 1960s to the societal revolution brought by the Digital Age. As is true with all battles won or lost, these tales offer up a host of winners and losers. Most show us an America at its best. When human failings take the lead, we occasionally see that part of America as well.