Written at the height of the American student movement, Action for a Change is a practical manual for turning political conviction into durable organisation.

Nader and Ross move quickly past protest as spectacle and into the less glamorous machinery of public-interest work: identifying an issue, researching institutions, gathering support, securing funds, hiring professional staff, dealing with universities and building campaigns capable of surviving beyond the original burst of outrage.

The book emerged alongside the creation of campus-based Public Interest Research Groups, which sought to convert student money and labour into permanent organisations working on consumer protection, environmental pollution, workplace safety, taxation and government accountability. It became an early blueprint for establishing PIRGs across the United States. Its insistence on continuity is particularly sharp: activism fails, the authors argue, when it remains episodic, emotionally reactive or dependent upon students whose institutional lives are designed to scatter them every semester.

Some of its procedural advice belongs unmistakably to 1971, but the structural questions have aged rather better than most political rhetoric: Who controls the research? Where does the money come from? How does a temporary campaign become an institution without calcifying into another bureaucracy? A compact artefact of post-1960s organising culture, and a useful corrective to the modern fantasy that political change is primarily a matter of visibility.

Grossman Publishers paperback, 1971, with Brent English and Joseph Highland. Covers rubbed, creased and edge-worn; corners bumped, with a small lower-cover tear. Binding sound.