Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left (Nation Books) - Softcover

Ross, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560255781 ISBN 13: 9781560255789

Publisher: Bold Type Books, 2004

Synopsis

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2004

After spilling bourbon on Schnaubelt's grave, its pugnacious and very dead occupant becomes Ross's mentor, sidekick, and boozing companion through this epic telling of the hallucinatory, carnal, and ornery histories of the American Left and John Ross's own remarkable life. Schnaubelt navigates us through his seemingly boundless revolutionary battleground, uttering cries of subversion from within the grave while trying to remain out of earshot from the FBI snoop and local supermarket tycoon buried nearby. Ross's own story—hobo revolutionist, junkie, poet, and journalist is a contrapuntal to Schnaubelt's. Ross never takes himself too seriously, yet his most remarkable trait is the honesty with which he approaches life, even while trying to deconstruct his own faults, personal tragedies (including the death of his one-month-old son), and imperfections. His pursuit of revolutionary politics and poetics is the constant, often spent with his muse, Revolutionary Mexico. Ross concludes with a trip to Baghdad as a "human shield," before the Anglo-American invasion, ready to sacrifice his life as part of his perpetual struggle for justice. Award-winning writer John Ross's memoir is inspired from a tumbledown tombstone in California: The headstone reads: E. B. Schnaubelt 1855–1913, "Murdered by Capitalism."

About this title

About the Author:

A native of New York City's Greenwich Village and a younger beat poet, John Ross tore up his draft card in 1957 and moved to Mexico from where he has been covering Latin America for the past 50 years for print and electronic media outlets, among them the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Noticias Aliadas, La Jornada, and Counterpunch. The author of ten volumes of fiction and non-fiction and an equal number of poetry chapbooks, Ross is the recipient of the American Book Award (1995) and the Upton Sinclair prize (2005). He has lived in the old quarter of Mexico City since the great 1985 earthquake.

From Publishers Weekly:

To hear Ross, who has covered Mexico for Noticias Aliadas (Lima), Texas Observer, San Francisco Bay Guardian and "other screwball publications," tell it, the American Left is dead and buried. Fittingly, he sets his history/dialogue in a graveyard populated by the ghosts of its heroes. Here lies E.B. Schnaubelt, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Sacco and Vanzetti and a host of others whose radical lifestyles and actions left their mark on those Communists, anarchists and revolutionaries who saw America in more utopian terms than the capitalists they fought. Soaked by alcohol and salved by drugs, Ross, who has made a life out of dissent, converses with the dead (and dying from memory), lamenting the Left's losses, its infighting, its failures and the occasional victory. But Ross stumbles in his rhetorical excesses and in his efforts to tie together so many disparate rebels and outlaws—from Goldman and Fidel to the Weathermen and Civil Rights leaders. Strictly for members of the choir looking for a good historical primer on the American Left, the book nevertheless entertains with its pugnacious language, Hunter Thompson-levels of chemical consumption and a conviction that no revolution can succeed without a sense of humor. Ross manages to salvage positivity from beneath all this forgotten death, and that's about all the solace the book offers for the true believer.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bold Type Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1560255781
• ISBN 13: 9781560255789
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400