punk - Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth

Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth
David Browne
Da Capo Press
2008
422 pp

Goodbye 20th Centiury is a very detailed band history of Sonic Youth from their 70s No Wave origins through to 2008. Author David Browne has also written books about James Taylor, Grateful Dead, and the Buckley bros. This book is not only highly detailed, but it is evenly detailed, where there author wrote as much about the production of albums like A Thousand Leaves and Rather Ripped as he does about Daydream Nation, the band's most revered album.

This is a book detailing a then still-unfolding story that has since, we all assume, concluded. The end-phase of marital dissolution that ended the band comes after 2008 and is therefore not a part of this story. At the time of publication the band was 30 years old and aside from some drummer changes a long time ago, had the same lineup for that whole time - they seemed permanent.

animal liberation - Boston Breakout

The Boston Breakout
Roy MacGregir
Tundra Books
2014
162 pages

Boston Breakout is a kids novel about a hockey team, the Tamarack Screech Owls, who travel from Ontario to Boston to play in a hockey tournament and get mixed up in animal liberation. Hockey's boring so I skipped all the hockey parts of this book to get to the animal liberation parts. One of the Screech Owls, Samantha, gets mixed up with a group of animal rights activists who, unknown to her, are planning to free the penguins and everything else from the Boston aquarium by blowing the thing apart so all of its water, and the animals that live in it, flow into the Boston Harbour. Samantha believes in the animal liberation cause but not the tactics so when she sees the activists she's made friends with interfering with the animal count she goes and tells on them so that their plan is stopped before any good can be done.

The book was pretty good if you skip the hockey and if you ignore the dumb statements about zoo animals preferring the zoo. If I had one little tiny critique, it would have to be about the ending, its all wrong: I would have changed it so the activists successfully pulled off their plan to destroy the acquarium, all of the animals would have flowed out into the habour and thrived there. I would have written the animals as playing a role in obtaining their freedom from the aquarium. Then, in my version, over a period of millennia, the wind would erode the city of Boston down to gritty ruins and the networks of roads and infrastructure would crumble from the growth of plants and trees and the effects of animals, sun, snow, and rain. The city of Boston would become a nameless wild, home to a strange colony of North American penguins. That would have made a much better ending for this book.

punk - Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years

Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years

Alex Ogg

2014

PM Press

204 pages

With all of the punk literature coming out in recent years and with all of the band histories and bios, there’s been nothing about Dead Kennedys until 2014. Now there are two books about the band’s debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables; there's a 2015 book in the 33/3 series and this one that started as liner notes for the album’s 2009 25th anniversary commemorate reissue. I’m happy about this because Dead Kennedys were, and still are, my favorite of the American hardcore punk bands. When I was in my mid to late teens I listened mostly to electronic music when a friend gave me a cassette mix of songs from Dead Kennedy’s Plastic Surgery Disasters and Lard’s Pure Chewing Satisfaction. I didn’t mind Lard, DK singer Jello Biafra’s industrial rock collaboration with Al Jourgensen, but I by far preferred the Dead Kennedys songs. A short time later I purchased Frankenchrist on cassette during the same trip to Spinables (now Vertigo Records, a record store in Ottawa) that I also picked up the Kevin Martin curated compilation Macro Dub Infection II. Not long after that I had most of the DK discography.  Now that I have a particular interest in books about counterculture I find myself reading books about bands and musicians whose work I have no interest in so I find the publication of books about the Dead Kennedys to be a happy occasion.

The book itself has a tight focus on the band’s formation and earliest performances through to the recording and release of their first album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, with a detailed discussion of each individual song. The book’s content is largely derived of interviews conducted with each band member and, as is well known, the majority of the band is in a long war over the band’s legacy with their former lead singer and songwriter, Jello Biafra. They hate each other and the things they disagree over in this book are the things I heard them fighting about when I first heard about their disputes: songwriting credits. Unfortunately these arguments make up a lot of this book’s content. Biafra, of course, has been able to continue his career in music without calling himself the Dead Kennedys, and anything his ex-bandmates say about Biafra’s ability to write a song has to be balanced against that. Like most Punk icons, Biafra’s talent for songwriting has waned over a 30 year period, but some of his collaborations from the early post DK years, the recordings with DOA and NoMeansNo especially, were top-notch. Even though his recent work might not stand with the classics, they can be considered “good”. My point is, the attribution of all those Dead Kennedys songs is contested territory, and this book is a battleground, but at least we can observe Biafra’s career as a songwriter beyond the Dead Kennedys legacy.

There’s more to the book than the arguments between old friends and the history of how they came to be. There’s also a lot of history of the practical business end of investing in, recording, manufacturing, promoting, and distributing the album. Ogg’s book includes some photos of the band that I haven’t seen anywhere else as well as some original artwork by Winston Smith, the great photomontage artist who produced a lot of album artwork for Biafra’s recordings and designed the iconic DK logo. The book ends with a series of statements from rockers and other types about how important Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is to them, confirming the album’s status as a cannonical punk album. The one thing I was looking for but never found was the meaning of the album’s title. Maybe I skimmed over such a discussion but I find that after reading the book I still don’t know what Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables means. Anyways, I hope there are more books about Dead Kennedys are in the works out there. I just found out that DH Peligro, the drummer for the Dead Kennedys for most of their original run, published a book in 2013 so maybe there are more DK related books than I thought.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - 2011 - Prodigal Father, Pagan Son: Growing Up Inside the Dangerous World of the Pagan Motorcycle Club

Prodigal Father, Pagan Son: Growing Up Inside the Dangerous World of the Pagan Motorcycle Club

Anthony “LT” Menginie and Kerrie Droban

Thomas Dunne Books

2011

267 pages

Kerrie Droban, who previously wrote Running With the Devil about former ATF agent Jay Dobyns and his infiltration of Arizona Hells Angels in Operation Black Biscuit, teamed up with Pagans MC scion Anthony “LT” Menginie to produce another motorcycle gang book, Prodigal Father, Pagan Son. In essence it’s another biker memoir, one of many published over the last decade. It seems as though every club wants to be represented in print in some form, and this book puts the Pagans MC into library stacks. Prodigal Father does have a crucial difference from most other biker memoirs though, LT was never a full patch Pagan but was rather a club prospect and the son of a powerful but unpopular Pagans chapter president, Anthony “Mangy” Menginie.

So LT grew from birth within the Pagans subculture and lifestyle. His father was in prison for much of his life/the book’s narrative arc and is therefore largely an absent referent throughout the book. LT’s growing up in a lifestyle and social scene where his gone father reigns as a king lends itself to lots of fun amature psychoanalyzing. Ultimately LTs father joined the Hells Angels, the enemy of all other biker clubs, and, in a expectedly classic Freudian turn, LT talks of killing his father. This memoir has most of the elements of many biker books, the discussions of crime and sex and brotherhood are consistently present in all of these books.

Prodigal Father doesn’t really have a lot of motorcycling in it, which is fine from my perspective. What it does have is a particular focus on the disgusting details of every event. LT describes the traumas of his early life, including an overdosing mother and being raped by a prostitute, and in all of these stories, straight through to later tales of direct criminal involvement, LT emphasizes the armpit stains of every characters, the piss stench of every room he enters, the minutia of disgust is laced through every description. So many of these memoirs do the ideological work of constructing the biker as a modern American individualist anti-hero while the true crime biker books counter the memoirs by emphasizing criminality. LT and Droban portray a subculture of the degraded social abject. People whose lives are composed, materially and metaphorically, of filth.

As I read this I wondered if there was such a thing as an outlaw biker without club affiliations. Thus far there doesn’t seem to be a concept of such a subject, and all the biker memoirs that I’ve read are the story of an individual biker and the story of their club.

underground railroad - 2009 - A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson

A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson

Kathleen Bradford

Scholastic Canada

2009

224 pages

A Desperate Road to Freedom is a work of fiction written in the style of a young girl's personal journal as she tells the story of her escape, with her family, from a slave farm in Virginia to a homestead in Ontario. Julia May Jackson, with her parents and siblings, flee slavery through the underground railroad to settle into the Owen Sound region. The book is a part of an interesting series, titled 'Dear Canada', put out by Scholastic Canada, of fictional journals written by girls who lived through times of historical trauma in the Canadian and (sometimes) American contexts. Other books in the series are written from the perspective of girls who lived through the internment of Japanese Canadian’s for example, or through the War of 1812. I intend to read the books on the Upper Canada rebellion of 1837 and the Red River Metis rebellion too.

I don’t know about other books in the series but what I admire about this particular entry is that it does not idealize Canadian society or sanitize it of its own racism. The history of slavery and the underground railroad in North America provides an opportunity for Canadians to compare our history with that of the (still) deeply racist US, with the potential for us to view ourselves historically as a nation as having more enlightened attitudes towards race. The diary of Julia May Jackson tells the story of racist brutality and murder in the US, but also of racial prejudice experienced after her family’s escape, in Ontario, where even the friendly folks of the area express their prejudices in subtle but no less upsetting terms.

Occupy Wall Street - 2013 - The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement

The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement
David Graeber
Spiegel & Grau
2013
326 pages

David Graeber is the former Yale assistant professor of anthropology who was let go from that institution, possibly for his anarchist political views. He currently teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. His anthropological work has been highly praised by others in the field, and as a far-left spokesman, he appears congenial and nonthreatening while expressing his thoughts in accessible language. He probably best known as an author for his excellent book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which investigates the history of debt across time and cultures and provided part of the intellectual grounding for Occupy Wall Street.

In addition to Graeber's career as educator and author, he is also an activist and was a principle organizer for the Occupy Wall Street movement. This book, The Democracy Project, is Graeber's report on the initial stages of Occupy's formation, his own role in the movement, and his perspective on what occured in Liberty park during the fall of 2011. Much like he had in his earlier work, Direct Action: An Ethnography, Graeber combines his two roles in in this book, scholar and activist, to describe what worked about Occupy.

The purpose of Graeber's book is to report on Occupy at a time when everyone believes the movement to have died out. He repeats through his book that social movements take years, decades even, to achieve the changes they seek, leaving the reader with the thought that perhaps the Occupy movement that appears moribund at the time of reading was a dramatic phase of a longer-lasting movement. Besides describing the Occupy movement, Graeber also describes in this book a set of institutions: media, police, financial organizations, government, and outlines how they constitute power in American society and how Occupy constituted a response to that power. At a deeper level of analysis, Graeber discusses how these institutions prevent the practice of real democracy in American society and how the Occupy movement pointed towards such a practice. One chapter, How Change happens, is almost entirely dedicated to a description of how the kind of real democracy envisioned by the Occupy movement was practiced in real life when all of the institutions that make up the existing power structure were doing whatever they could to destroy it.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - 2004 - Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Edward Winterhalder

Blockhead City Press

2005

432 pages

Edward Winterhalder is another biker who has leveraged his outlaw experience into a career as a media personality. Once a national officer of the Bandidos MC and El Presidente of the Oklahoma Bandidos chapter, he is now an author, television producer, and professional interview subject. Out in Bad Standing is Winterhalder’s first book and his coming out as a pundit on biker topics, it gives the details of Winterhalder’s life as a biker, as a family man, as a musician, and as a businessman.

Blockhead City Press is Out in Bad Standing’s publisher, and from what I can tell, it’s Winterhalder’s own publishing company. In essence, Winterhalder published his own autobiography. The length of this book, at 432 pages, communicates a lack of editing, and to compare, Sonny Barger’s own bio, Hell’s Angel, recalling the career of the man who essentially formed the model of the outlaw motorcycle club in the 1950s, is only 288 pages. Winterhalder’s book is long, and somewhat tedious, but its good to have one out there by a Bandido since all the other major clubs are represented in the bio literature. Still, Winterhalder’s book tells the same stories of riding around, rocking out, getting into trouble, having friends die or jail or succumb to drug addiction, as the other books and its hard not to feel like, as a reader, one outlaw biker autobiography is enough to read to have the lifestyle figured out.

What intrigues me about these biker bios are the balance they try to maintain between presenting themselves as model outlaw bikers and as model citizens, and I’m always left wondering if these bios are for other bikers to read or for cultural outsiders? Outlaw bikers have such a tough time convincing everyday citizens that they’re not criminals, or at least, they’re not criminal organizations, that these books often heavily emphasize both the duller aspects of outlaw biker life, or the ways in which the subject is not a biker. Winterhalder is a good father, he owns a successful construction business, and he’s a musician. Presumably his band plays that beer-belly blues rock with harmonicas blaring that you hear whenever a biker appears on television. He was also a chapter president and a national officer with many duties, and he writes at length of the administrative side, with its numerous headaches, of managing a motorcycle club. So by reading his book he convinced me that he’s not a career criminal, but his book goes down these textual roads where, when he’s talking about problems occurring behind the scenes of the Bandidos, it feels as though he’s not trying to convince me that he’s legit, but rather he’s telling his social scene a side to a story that’s best known to other Bandidos.

The book has a strange structure to it, it begins with his trip to Canada to patch over the Rock Machine in the midst of the Montreal biker war, before it goes into his life story. He tells the story that the Bandidos were only willing to patch them over if the war was over, and its tough to be fully convinced that Bandidos are crime free as an organization, when they’re willing to take on men engaged in such a conflict, especially when hostilities continued for a time after the transition, and Bandidos died. A year after the book’s publication, the Shedden Massacre occurred in Southwestern Ontario, where 8 Ontario Bandidos were murdered. The Bandidos may generally be a large group of guys who are ready for a fight but really just want to have fun riding motorcycles and partying, but even if you believe that that’s what they are as a group they’re obviously accommodating to people with very violent inclinations. Winterhalder comes off as smart and tough but also fun and friendly, in his book, but he’s also a part of an outlaw subcultural group that has been involved with events termed ‘riots’, ‘wars’, and ‘massacres’. I may be wrong but even with their fearsome reputation, the Hells Angels don’t have any ‘massacres’ in their history, the Bandidos have two, Milperra and Shedden.

anarchism - 1994 - Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin

Monkeywrench Press and The Worker Self-Education Foundation of the Industrial Workers of the World

1994

153 pages

This book, Anarchism and the Black Revolution, was a title that surprised me when I was trying to get to know the library book collection of the midwestern rural community college I was tasked with managing. Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin is a black power activist and anarchist who spent from 1969 to 1983 in prison for hijacking an aircraft. Before his incarceration he spent the late 60s in the black power movement as a member of the Black Panthers. Towards the end of his prison term he began to write anarchist pamphlets which are collected in this small volume.

One of the most interesting aspects of the first of his pamphlets collected here, “Anarchism and the Black Revolution”, was that Ervin attempted to chart an anarchist course for black revolutionary action in the US, divergent from the Maoist or pacifist courses of action taken by black revolutionaries before him. Furthermore, he addresses, in a 994 piece, issues of white privilege among anarchists and tackles the question of why there aren't more people of colour in the anarchist scene, a question that radical movements keep returning to. Ervin noted that white anarchists exercise their white privilege when they sweep questions of race to the side in strict favour of focusing on class issues. Ervin argues that black workers (along with women) have historically, and continue to be, placed below white men, who, as unionists, are collaborators of oppression when they claim this privilege.

He also advocates for the development of an international Anarchist Black Cross network, the anarchist prisoner support group that took up his case in the late 70s.

He wrote these pamphlets in prison and I don't know how many other things he wrote after his release or if prison was his most productive time as an anarchist philosopher. He does emphasize direct action in his work which he took to extremes in the 60s with ‘skyjacking’, and he also emphasizes the importance of the worker to social movements, and advocates anarcho-syndicalism.

Students for a Democratic Society - 1969 - Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Jerry L. Avorn

Atheneum Press

1969

307 pages

Up Against the Ivy Wall is a detailed account of the April-May 1968 student uprising at Columbia University. This brief and highly concentrated event involved, most dramatically, the occupation of administration offices and other campus spaces by dissident students led by Mark Rudd and his chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, a national organization for leftist students. The uprising had many different dimensions to it, but it largely stemmed from student opposition to Columbia’s contributions to military research, and the expansion of the wealthy university’s campus into impoverished Harlem by dispossessing poor nearby residents of their homes for the purpose of building a new gymnasium.

The main thing that interests me about this book is that it appears to be an example of a book that’s no longer published. Up Against the Ivy Wall is a scholarly and densely detailed account of a brief moment in time, 307 pages describing four weeks of life in a tiny section of New York City. This was published in 1969, months after the events themselves, which almost indicates an urgency in publishing a clear account of the events in question. This book, in the density and quality of the detail it provides of a short period of time in the life of a social movement, is similar to Donn Teal’s The Gay Militants, which, in similar depth tells the story of year one of the gay liberation movement in America shortly after it concluded. I know that other such events, including the Occupy Movement and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests inspired books which were published quickly, but I haven’t read any such book that reaches the level of detail found in the two older texts.

beats - 2007 - Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady
Noah Buschel
2007
Jean Doumanian Productions
80 min

Neal Cassady is a biographical film focusing on Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty muse for On the Road, Neal Cassady. This film minimizes his friendship with Kerouac, confining their interactions to the first 20 minutes of the film. Most of the movie actually focuses on the second phase of Cassady's career as a behind-the-scenes countercultural protagonist, his relationship to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Cassady is a pivotal figure in American counterculture, first inspiring the beats to write and later befriending one of the best known hippie collectives of the era. His relevance is rooted in his friendships with the era-defining writers of these periods, and some of the scenes in this film use these writers interactions with Cassady as metaphoric markers of the passage of one era to another. In particular tensions are represented between Kesey and Kerouac. Kerouac is shown to reject the hippies who, in return, rejected him as well. Interestingly, Alan Ginsberg, who not only knew Cassady but also enjoyed relevance from one era to another, and was friends with Kesey himself, was not mentioned until 50 minutes into the film. The film is thus two travel narratives, first On the Road and Pranksters On the Bus.

Much of the movie is a simulation of 1960s film footage of the Prankster's cross-country bus trip or of a Ken Kesey party where Kesey pressures a drunken 1960s Keuroac to take acid. This shift in perspective and in media is a technique for conveying a sense of authenticity, and here it also refers to the hours and hours of film the pranksters shot of their voyage, film that was never edited into a proper film but nevertheless has found its way into countless documentaries about the 1960s.

The jazz music soundtrack largely signifies the beat era even if the film's emphasis is on the 1960s and psychedelia.

occupy wall street - 2012 - We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation

We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation
Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, Mike McGuire (eds)
AK Press
2012

The Occupy Wall Street Movement was, to an outsider, at some times exhilarating to watch, and at other times, very strange and occasionally disappointing. The police are part of the 99%? An anti-capitalist moment of silence for Steve Jobs? Why? Because he was a vegetarian in addition to being a brutal industrialist? Still it was a real uprising in America, in lower Manhattan, that largely adhered to anarcho-socialist ideals of building a new world in the shell of the old.

Occupy Wall Street generated a lot of literature within twelve months of the movement's start date of September 17, 2011. There were many books about Occupy published even before January 2012, when the movement still seemed like it may continue in its original form. We Are Many, from the venerable AK Press, is a collection of reflective pieces on the movement that came later in 2012, with a number of its authors referring to writing their entries during the summer of that year. Almost all of the authors are almost politically radical and while there is a great deal of variety to the entries, many of the pieces are critical of the more liberal side of the movement. This was the side of the movement who suggested that police were part of their class and, presumably, felt that Steve Jobs was an honorable exception to the plutocratic class the movement claimed to opposed.

The book includes dozens of short entries, including pieces on the handmade signs, spirituality, race and gender issues, connections to other uprisings, movement strategies and constitutive documents, and many personal reflections. The entry that struck me more than any other when I was reading the book was titled, The Tourist Brochures in People's Hearts: A Snapshot from Occupy Santa Fe. This was a piece in which the author, artist and writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore paints a picture of a local occupy movement directed by people who may be members of the %99 but they wouldn't be members of the %95, if that was the term adopted by the movement.  Bernstein Sycamore's piece expresses a passionate love for the ideals of the movement to be realized, and a bitter critique of a local encampment which was turned into a public relations forum for a thriving local arts market by wealthy art dealers, gallery owners, and artists. The piece reads like an address to a general assembly, and perhaps that's what it was written as, but more importantly it sketches out a situation where all of the radical energy of the movement was siphoned away by liberals and their wish-washy views on society. The idea that the arts community just plain belongs to Occupy is a liberal one. Bernstein Sycamore laments the tears of someone crying in anguish over the closing of twenty galleries, which, sure, sounds bad, until our author goes on to note how many many  galleries there actually are in Santa Fe and how much money and competition there is in their market. You might cry for the art galleries and you probably wouldn't shed a tear for luxury car dealerships but both types of commercial institutions cater to upper-middle class consumers and play a role in economic disparities.

The book covered many aspects of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but not all of them. The role of social media was actually downplayed in this book. I don't remember reading a mention of the 'We are the 99%' tumblr page that featured those iconic and mimetic images of individuals holding up their handwritten stories of woe in selfie shots and affirming their support for the movement. I don't think Anonymous' role in the movement was given much attention here, and I would have loved to have read something about the library at Liberty Plaza. Oh well... it's still probably the best book I've seen on the movement to date.

civil rights movement - 2005 - The Long Walk to Freedom

The Long Walk to Freedom
Tom Weidlinger
2005
Moira Productions
30 min

This documentary shares its title with the much better known Nelson Mandela autobiography and film adaptation, so it's search-engine obscure thanks to this.The Long Walk to Freedom is a short documentary featuring civil rights activists speaking to students at George Washington High School in San Francisco California. The documentary is another addition to the long list of documentaries on the American civil rights movement, but it also demonstrates the ongoing commitment of civil rights activists to educate new generations about a struggle that in many ways continues still.

The documentary shows a racially diverse group of activists speaking to public school students about their experiences. It is broken down into segments organized by themes like music and non-violent resistance. I assume that the documentary's ideal audience are students, and the setting for viewing is a classroom. The division of the film's subject matter into short and easy to comprehend thematic segments is an ideal way of presenting this subject for classroom discussion.

transcendentalists - 1987 - Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution

Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution

Paula Blanchard

Addison-Wesley Publishing

1987

371 pages

Paula Blanchard wrote a highly detailed biography of Margaret Fuller, a member of the literary, philosophical, and spiritual Transcendentalist movement of mid-19th century New England. The movement is best remembered as the group which counted America’s best loved philosophers of nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as members. Fuller is a less remembered member of the group probably because her involvement was, according to Blanchard, oriented around conversation rather than writing. Emerson and Thoreau had not only attained a certain status as American philosophers, but also their writings did much to found a uniquely American literature.  Fuller's own writings were often relatively short pieces of social criticism, many of which were revolutionary calls for increased rights for women.

Fuller's output was lighter on textual production than some of the other transcendentalist, although she was editor of one of the major organs of the movement’s thought, The Dial, a periodical where she published much of her own writing. Blanchard's text is a very detailed account of Fuller's life discussing her strict upbringing, oriented around her education, by her politician father, Timothy Fuller. her background directed her into an adult career as a strict schoolteacher who was nevertheless loved by her students.  She then went on to enter the Transcendentalist circle in which she formed non-conformist beliefs and developed a strain of social commentary which blossomed into the fight for equal rights for women in America.  Fuller’s story as told by Blanchard ends with the great woman embarking on a European tour with little money, and ending up with a family - to her death on the shoals the American east coast upon her return to her homeland.

Fuller seems entrenched in the Transcendentalist movement, which led her to the cause of women’s rights and to become a pioneering mind in early American feminism.  I don’t know much about this volume’s author, Paula Blanchard, aside from that she has written biographies of other great women, such as the Canadian painter Emily Carr and American author Sarah Orne Jewett.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2011 - The Aging Rebel: Dispatches from the Motorcycle Outlaw Frontier

The Aging Rebel: Dispatches From the Motorcycle Outlaw Frontier

Donald Charles Davis

2011

270 pages

Donald Charles Davis is a freelance journalist who currently writes and maintains The Aging Rebel, a blog about outlaw biker issues. This book is an anthology of posts from that blog although much of the blog material focusing on The Mongols Motorcycle Club is absent (and presumably rewritten into another of Davis’ self-published books, Out Bad) and rather focuses, for the most part, on peripheral subject matter to the outlaw biker lifestyle and image.

The items that appear in The Aging Rebel carry a few key themes. Many of the posts relate to motorcycling such as helmet laws, or for greater safety awareness among car-drivers. Many other items are obituaries for bikers who died on the road. Other items are relevant to the world of outlaw bikers, including pieces on a Hells Angels trademark lawsuit and criticism of other reporter’s handling of biker news.

Davis’ book is interesting because its good writing about bikers from someone who knows about the subculture. It’s also old fashioned reporting like what you imagine reporters on tv shows and movies about newswriting churn out. So much of what appears in the news, on all topics and in all sources, are institutional press releases with a reporter’s name added because they tacked on an introduction. Davis investigates his stories, and adds insight drawn from his immense knowledge of his subject matter. His work is exemplary of what journalism can be in an age of ubiquitous self-publishing possibilities, where mainstream journalism arises out of an industrial process and older professional values are taken up by individuals who have a vested interest in exploring a particular subject.

outlaw bikers - book - 2006 - Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers Global Crime Empire

Angels of Death: Inside the Biker’s Global Crime Empire

Julian Sher and William Marsden

Alfred A. Knopf

2006

464 pages

Angels of Death is a survey of recent, to the time of publication, violent crimes committed by various bikers around the world. The title is a dramatic misnomer, as the inclusion of the word ‘angels’ strongly suggests that the book is exclusively about the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, which it isn’t.  Furthermore, the authors, two Montreal journalists turned true-crime writers, claim that there’s a worldwide biker syndicate but they never ground that assertion in facts. What they do, instead, is show that the outlaw biker subculture is global and that everywhere bikers live bad things, sometimes truly atrocious things, happen. Angels of Death is primarily a series of lurid true-crime murder stories connected by the mode of transportation the killers chose.

ku klux klan - book - 1992 - The Invisible Empire in the West: Towards a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s

The Invisible Empire in the West: Towards a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s

Shawn Lay (ed.)

University of Illinois Press

1992, 2004

248 pages

The Invisible Empire in the West is a collection of essays on the presence and activities of the Ku Klux Klan in a number of then small cities in the Western United States. There are a total of seven essays and six are focused on specific urban centres: Denver, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Anaheim, Eugene, and La Grande. Each of these essays focuses on the specific details of each localized Klan unit, and the challenges that the social composition of each of these cities presented to the Klan in those regions.  

This volume is edited by Shawn Lay, a professor of history and current chair of the Department of History, Philosophy and Religion at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina. Lay has written a number of books on Klan history and it appears as though this may be the domain of his expertise.  Many of the contributors to his collection also appear to be Klan historians, and this book may represent the efforts of a particular generation of KKK experts (Lay, in his conclusion to The Invisible Empire, uses the phrase “klan studies”) to impose a radical new historical vision of the once national, ultra-conservative organization.  In the introduction and the conclusion, Lay discusses how recent research into the Klan during the early 1920s (when the Klan was modeled after fraternal groups such as the Lions Club) has revealed the organization to be, at that time, primarily urban and middle class in its cultural situation and composition, and that it was not necessarily focused on preserving privilege for white Americans.  

Lay insists that the view this book presents of the KKK is radically different from the representation produced by earlier Klan historians such as David Mark Chalmers (in his book Hooded Americanism) or Wyn Craig Wade (via his book The Fiery Cross). Lay’s arguments rest on the fact that these earlier historians constructed the Klan as a phenomenon that arose out of rural backwardness.  The historical representation of the Klan as constructed by Lay and company is certainly radically different from that of earlier histories, however I prefer when a historian is also willing to account for the previous, in his or her eyes inadequate or inaccurate, interpretation of a historical phenomena.  Lay simply points out that Wade, Chalmers, and a selection of other Klan historians, simply failed to properly apprehend the KKK of the early 1920s.  

While many of the essays are quite interesting in their investigations of the Klan in various regional contexts (including, for example, an essay about the tensions of a predominantly and militantly protestant KKK recruiting in the almost entirely Mormon Salt Lake City, Utah), Lay’s own assertions about this new vision of the Klan is not really supported by his fellow “Klan Studies” academics.  In his conclusion, Lay argues that this book has shown the Klan of the 1920s to not have been overtly bigoted or violent.  Certainly, the Klan held many prejudices, not just their world famous disdain for blacks, and Lay’s book shows that they were also opposed to Catholics and Jews. The essays in The Invisible Empire in the West, recant numerous instances of local Klaverns (the KKK name for a regional chapter of the organization) expressing their not-so-positive opinions on these other, non-black, socio-cultural groups. Perhaps the specific regional contexts spotlighted by the authors of these essays gave more opportunity to the Klaverns that formed there to target Catholics with their bigotry than they did for other groups. Furthermore, while physical violence may have been rare, the essays include a fair number of accounts of the Klan using intimidating and threatening language against their targets in their crusade to maintain a social order that privileged white protestant Americans.