Ron Jacobs: Getting Juiced with Ishmael Reed

Ron Jacobs: Getting Juiced with Ishmael Reed

The Co-Conspirator's Tale Now Available

http://www.fomitepress.com/FOMITE/Co-Conspirator.html

1979.  When Peter Somers fell in love with a girl named moonshadow on the Berkeley pier, little did he know that she was a member of a group of wannabe revolutionaries.  After an undercover cop is killed and another friend is falsely charged with the murder, the cell disappears.

2007.  Somers ends up back in Berkeley after receiving a letter describing the arrest of his friend on murder charges.  He joins forces with a lawyer and others in an attempt to clear his friend's name.  The authorities have something else in mind. 

There's a place where love and mistrust are never at peace; where duplicity and deceit are the universal currency. The Co-Conspirator's Tale takes place within this nebulous firmament. Crimes committed by the police in the name of justice. Excess in the name of revolution. The combination leaves death in its wake and the survivors struggling to find justice in a San Francisco Bay Area noir by the author of the underground classic The Way the Wind Blew:A History of the Weather Underground and the novel Short Order Frame Up.

There are no hero cops or private eyes in The Co-Conspirator's Tale, just a couple of folks who don't trust the world as it is to provide justice. The battlefields are the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area and the psyches of the accused, their accomplices and their accusers.

A New Novel is On the Way!

There's a place where love and mistrust are never at peace; where duplicity and deceit are the universal currency. The Co-Conspirator's Tale takes place within this nebulous firmament. Crimes committed by the police in the name of justice. Excess in the name of revolution. The combination leaves death in its wake and the survivors struggling to find justice in a San Francisco Bay Area noir by the author of the underground classic The Way the Wind Blew:A History of the Weather Underground and the novel Short Order Frame Up.

There are no hero cops or private eyes in The Co-Conspirator's Tale, just a couple of folks who don't trust the the world as it is to provide justice. The battlefields are the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area and the psyches of the accused, their accomplices and their accusers.

The Co-Conspirator's Tale will be published by Fomite, Burlington, Vermont in Spring 2011. I will let you know when it becomes available.

Fomite is a literary press whose authors and artists explore the human condition -- political, cultural, personal and historical -- in poetry and prose.

Tripping Through the American Night

My latest book, titled Tripping Through the American Night, was published in ebook format on October 8, 2010. The format used is known as epub--it is accessible on almost every ebook platform except Kindle (although there is some kind of conversion software out there). I read a sample on my PC by downloading the free Adobe Digital Editions software.

It is a collection of essays about this land we call the United States. Naturally, they are written from a libertarian left perspective. Many of them originally appeared in Counterpunch. From the resignation of Richard Nixon to the knighthood of Mick Jagger; from the war in Vietnam to the election of Barack Obama; and from the campus of University of Maryland to the streets of Berkeley, it's all there. If you are interested in buying (or borrowing)a copy (assuming you have a way to read it), go to
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/books/e/2940011816574/?itm=1&USRI=tripping+through+the+american+night

Thanks. If you are interested in reviewing it, send me an email!

Dave Zirin

Dave Zirin is a sportswriter who occupies a rare niche in the United States. He writes about sports from the left side of the political spectrum. Despite the fact that mainstream media doesn't usually like to provide the left with a forum on its shows, Dave's humor and delivery make him a natural for sports talk shows, so they put him on the airwaves more often than you would think. It's his books, though, that set him apart from most sportswriters in today's world. His latest, Welcome to the Terrordome, is a hard hitting attack on the greed of corporate sports and the culture it has created. Check it out!

Stuff to read

I like to contribute to Counterpunch, ZNet, State of Nature, and DissidentVoice. All of these are alternative media outlets that provide a view countering that of the corporate capitalists.

The Way the Wind Blew:A History of the Weather Underground

From the publisher:
A gripping account of 1960s radicals who took up arms against the state

The arrest and subsequent imprisonment of Silas Bissell, former heir to the rug-cleaning fortune who was discovered living near Eugene, Oregon, in 1987, drew a line under one of the most spectacular and bizarre episodes in the historv of the American New Left, for it marked the official end of the Weathermen. Product of splits within the antiwar movement during the late 1960s, the Weather Underground would become synonymous with violent, clandestine resistance to racism and imperialism in the United States and, for some, a symptom of how the movement went wrong.

In the first comprehensive history of the Weathermen, Ron Jacobs narrates the origins, development and ultimate demise of the organization: its emergence from the Students for a Democratic Society; its role in the famous Days of Rage in Chicago during October 1969; its decision to go underground; the various actions it staged … and in some cases bungled -- during the 1970s; its role as goad to other left organizations to sustain the struggle against racism and imperialism; and finally its disintegration, as various members were either captured or surrendered. Drawing on a rich array of documents, interviews with participants and an unrivalled knowledge of the history of the New Left, Jacobs weaves a gripping tale, by turns inspiring and hair-raising … a fitting testimony to the serried adventures of Weatherman itself.

The Way the Wind Blew fuses the excitement of a thriller with an objective assessment of US 1960s radicalism. It is an indispensable resource for comprehending the recent history of the US left.