Forget those L.L. Bean and Harry & David catalogs! When you’re picking out presents for the holidays, send revolutionary literature as gifts and help support independent publishers and booksellers. If you want a wider selection of anti-authoritarian titles, contact Left Bank Books, 92 Pike St., Seattle WA 98101; tel and fax: 206-622-0195; or AK Press, P.O. Box 40682, San Francisco CA 94140; tel: 415-864-0892.
BEYOND GEOGRAPHY: THE WESTERN SPIRIT AGAINST THE WILDERNESS by Frederick Turner
Traces the “spiritual history” that led up to the European domination and decimation of the Western hemisphere’s native peoples who were as rich in mythic life as the new arrivals were barren. Turner follows the unconscious desire for the contentment they sensed in the primitives they destroyed.
Rutgers U. Press 329 pp. $15
THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE by Raoul Vaneigem
Written in 1963-65 and first published in France in 1967, Vaneigem’s book complements Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle which appeared in the same year. As the main programmatic statements of the Situationist International, these two works played a larger part than any other publications in the gestation of the 1968 French May events.
Left Bank Books 216 pp. $16
SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE by Guy Debord
Black & Red 221 pp. $5
A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn
“…engaging, informative, passionate and extremely well-written…the best critical survey of American history available.” —FE Review
Harper & Row 614 pp. $12
FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION by Jerry Mander
Television doesn’t just have “bad” content, but changes how we perceive the world. Experience is no longer direct, but mediated by T.V. through centralized and unified images. The result is a loss of the sensuous world and a passive, easily manipulated population.
Quill 371 pp. $9
THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE AND OTHER ESSAYS by Jacques Camatte
Camatte straightforwardly calls leftist political organizations and labor unions “rackets.” He depicts a voracious Capital endowed with anthropomorphic needs requiring the domestication of humans. The stand-off between Capital vs. The Earth gives a context for evaluating ecological devastation. Camatte helped us to definitively leave the Progress bandwagon.
Autonomedia 256 pp. $9
LIVING MY LIFE Vol I & II by Emma Goldman
The turbulent autobiography of a woman at the center of the century’s major events. Although her life intersected with the famous figures of the era, it is the day-to-day struggles for anarchy which make this account come alive. This is the original two-volume edition first published in 1931.
Dover 993 pp. (2 volumes) $18
HAVING LITTLE, BEING MUCH: A CHRONICLE OF FREDY PERLMAN’S FIFTY YEARS by Lorraine Perlman
A remembrance of a friend, and the times and the Detroit community in which he lived. “Lorraine’s direct and unadorned style lets Fredy’s life speak for itself; one cannot help but see it as exemplary.” —FE Review
Black & Red 155 pp. $5
THE FINAL EMPIRE: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION by Wm. H. Kotke
Kotke’s target is civilized human society over the past 10,000 years. Facing the final empire, the emerging global corporate system and its last-gasp exponential curve toward ecological exhaustion, Kotke advocates planting seed communities, new human families based in Permaculture and healing, working together to recover the complex relations with nature and each other, lost in civilization’s millennia of subjugating indigenous peoples.
Arrowpoint Press 396 pp. $15
T.A.Z.: TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE by Hakim Bey
This text is still in search of communities that would meaningfully debate as well as indulge its insights and vision. Ontological Anarchism, Poetic Terrorism, and the Temporary Autonomous Zone are the articles of belief for a new community which actualizes its will-to-power as disappearance. Bey says to authoritarians and anti-authoritarians alike, that human liberation, beauty and adventure lie beyond the hypocrisies and banalities of our present.
Autonomedia 141 pp. $7
ECO-DEFENSE: A FIELD GUIDE TO MONKEY WRENCHING edited by Dave Foremen and Bill Haywood
This new, revised and enlarged third edition contains everything the wilderness defender needs to know about how to disable, dismantle, and destroy the machinery, buildings and vehicles, etc. of those who are raping the earth for profit. Sabotage techniques are richly detailed with diagrams, firsthand accounts and “field notes.”
Ned Ludd Books 311 pp. $20
THE LAST DAYS OF CHRIST THE VAMPIRE by J.G. Eccarius
One of the most blasphemous books we have seen since the classics of sacrilege. The book jacket states: “His power grew over the ages. Enslaving minds and bodies through both religious hierarchies and direct telepathic control, Jesus Christ the Vampire promises people eternal life for the price of their minds.” 80,000 copies sold!
111 Publishing 180 pp. $10
FREE WOMEN OF SPAIN: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women by Martha Ackelsberg
Ackelsberg traces the efforts during the Spanish Revolution by Mujeres Libres to create an independent organization of working class women that would empower them to take their place in the revolution and in the new society. She argues that their analysis of domination and subordination, and the centrality of notions of community, are equally important for contemporary feminists.
Indiana Univ. Press 256 pp. $15
THE GREAT FRENCH REVOLUTION: 1789-1793 VOLS. 1 & 2 By Peter Kropotkin
Kropotkin sees the revolution as a continuous stream of popular action, beginning long before the revolution itself. In the clash between the Jacobins and their opponents—the Hebertists, Enrages, and Anarchists—Kropotkin draws out the origins of Marxism and Leninism within the Jacobins. Although the French Revolution was a popular, mass event, it was directed and disciplined by a minority of professional revolutionaries. Those who continue to exalt the organization of a post-revolutionary State fail to see that the interests followed were, in France, and everywhere else, exactly those of the bourgeoisie.
Elephant Editions 2 vol. 602 pp. $15
OBJECTIVITY & LIBERAL SCHOLARSHIP by Noam Chomsky
Introduction by Peter Werbe
Taken from Chomsky’s 1969 American Power and the New Mandarins, this thin volume exposed his colleagues’ cooperation with the imperial slaughter in Southeast Asia. Written while the Vietnam war was raging, he also demonstrates that the same ideology distorts the work of scholars who analyzed earlier conflicts. His critique of historians of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War includes a stirring account of the anarchist participation which is either ignored or falsified by liberals and stalinists alike. The best short history of the Spanish anarchists’ triumphs and defeats.
Black &Red 142 pp. $6
TIMBER WARS by Judi Bari
These are some of the essays that played a role in radicalizing a generation of ecology activists. Essays and interviews on Redwood Summer and the bombing which crippled Bari, on the split in Earth First!, on life in the timber mills, on mainstream environmentalist betrayals of the grassroots movement, on “the feminization of Earth First!,” on monkeywrenching and the decision to renounce tree-spiking, and much more. Proceeds from sale of this book go to the Redwood Justice Fund to continue Judi’s and Darryl Cherney’s lawsuit against the FBI for complicity in the 1990 car bombing.
Common Courage Press, 344 pp. $15
THE BOMB by Frank Harris
Aleister Crowley called this 1909 fictionalized account of the Haymarket bomb incident by the author of My Life and Loves, “the best novel I have ever read.” It is written as a narrative from the uncaught anarchist who threw the explosive which killed the Chicago police attacking 8-hour day protesters and led to the state murder of the five Haymarket martyrs. It contains a right-wing introduction from a 1963 edition by John Dos Passos and an afterword by John Zerzan.
Feral House 213 pp. $13
PEOPLE WITHOUT GOVERNMENT An Anthropology of Anarchism by Harold Barclay
“Ten thousand years ago everyone was an anarchist,” writes Barclay in this engaging book. Barclay covers anarchy among hunter-gatherers, gardeners, herders, agriculturalists and even moderns. He has reservations about primal societies (we would probably disagree with some fundamentals in his description). Yet his “anarcho-cynicalist point of view”-that anarchy may never be attained, and thus “The battle is forever”-is undogmatic, and his citations interesting and appealing.
Kahn& Averill $12.95
BEYOND BOOKCHIN: PREFACE FOR A FUTURE SOCIAL ECOLOGY by David Watson
Besides providing a thorough critique of Murray Bookchin’s narrow version of social ecology, this wide-ranging essay explores new paths of thinking about radical ecological politics. “A brilliant, carefully argued critique [which] will do much to restore social ecology’s promise as a broad, liberatory vision.”-John Clark. “Bookchin is the Elmer Fudd of North American anarchism, and Watson is the Bugs Bunny.” – Hakim Bey.
Black & Red/Autonomedia 256 pp. $8.00
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY translated & edited by Ken Knabb
A compendium of writings by the influential Situationist International group. Included are texts preceding the group’s formation, soundtracks from Guy Debord’s avant-garde films, flyers dating from May 1968 and internal I.S. exchanges.
Bureau of Public Secrets 406 pp. $15
For a complete list of available issues of the FE, send an SASE, or request it with your book order. Fifth Estate Books is located at 4632 Second Avenue, just south of W. Forest, in Detroit, in the same space as the Fifth Estate Newspaper. Hours vary, so please call before coming by.
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