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Don DeLillo's follow-up to Libra, his brilliant fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination, Mao II is a series of elusive set-pieces built around the themes of mass psychology, individualism vs. the mob, the power of imagery and the search for meaning in a blasted, post-modern world. Bill Gray, the world's most famous reclusive novelist, has been working for many years on a stalled masterpiece when he gets the chance to aid a hostage trapped in a basement in war-torn Beirut. Gray sets out on a doomed, quixotic journey, and his disappearance disrupts the cloistered lives of his obsessed assistant and the assistant's companion, a former Moonie who has also become Bill's lover. This haunting, masterful novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992.
Book Description
(1992 PEN/FAULKER AWARD)
In MAO II, Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence when he gets the chance to aid a hostage trapped in a basement in war-torn Beirut, a nightscape of Semtex explosives. Gray's dangerous departure leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover - and Bill's. MAO II is a series of set-pieces built around the theme of searching for meaning in a post-modern world.
"DeLillo's brilliant 10th novel...writing so piercingly exact, characters so palpable, dialogue so shimmering, that the ideas burn off like summer smoke and become skywriting." (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Customer Reviews:
No one actually thinks and talks like these characters.......2007-07-28
It took some doing to get through this novel. The main question that kept hitting me as I carefully read this book was: What kind of people actually think and speak in the kind of overdone, conflagration of semi-metaphysical adjectives that Delillo puts into his character's minds and mouths? The different threads of the story do not come together in the end, so there's a great sense of randomness in this novel. Further, Delillo repeats ideas, I assume, in order to make his point; but I felt a bit belittled intellectually by this. For example, in his brief section about how the crowds are going crazy trying to keep Khomeini's body out of the grave, Delillo keeps telling us over and over again what the purpose is for these people acting the way they do. It just seems like Delillo was trying too hard.
Pretentious and Obtuse - Vastly Overrated By One of Our Best.......2007-06-10
First of all, I've read WHITE NOISE and RATNER'S STAR. I enjoyed both because they bordered on science fiction as Delillo looked at American culture from two skewed perspectives. That said, I found MAO II a huge disappointment. (And I know I'm the only dissenting voice here. We're supposed to WORSHIP writers like Delillo, but I'm long past my idol-worshipping stage.) The fault with this book is the writing itself. It's terribly self-conscious and the dialogue is such that no human man or woman would speak it, in this world anyway. WHITE NOISE seemed utterly real to me: the industrial accident, the necessity to escape it, etc. I was completely riveted by the drama and the philosophizing WHITE NOISE. In MAO II the characters are clearly opposing voices from Delillo's artistic psyche and are used as such. But the actual, physical prose of the novel kept jumping out at me rather than settling in to tell a story. And that's quite the problem with the BIG SHOTS these days. I think many of them are writing in an attempt to outdo one another. I can see Delillo looking over his shoulder at Robert Stone, Philip Roth, John Irving, or Cormac McCarthy. There was very little in this story that I found compelling and after a while I gave up. People just do not speak the way Delillo writes them in MAO II. Or maybe I'm hanging out with a different crowd that uses a different kind of English. Except that I've taught English literature for 25 years and know a bad book when I read one. If you're in to hero worship and see writing as about _writing_ and not _story_, then Delillo is your man. If you want to read a masterpiece that says everything you might want to know about both _story_ and writing, find John Gardner's MICKELSON'S GHOSTS. Or read John Fowles THE MAGUS. Great writers will be those men and women who tell great stories. The physical writing will be the vehicle that gets them there. But it is not the be-all or end-all of literature. If you haven't read any Delillo yet, forget MAO II and find RATNER'S STAR or WHITE NOISE.
Art and Terrorism.......2007-02-17
DeLillo has written another gem with MAO II: A NOVEL. Much has been said about the details of this work, but I believe the entirety can be summed up in the following quote from the book:
"When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, nothing is out-of-place."
Highly recommended...
Terrorism is the newest form of the novel..........2007-01-26
For whatever else it is, adventure story, mystery, literary political thriller, *Mao II* is basically an extended meditation on art--and, in particular, the writer's role--in articulating, interpreting, and effecting change in the world. More specifically, DeLillo raises the question of whether a writer has *any* role in these endeavors any more. It's an interesting question for writers, and so to me ((author, Hardcore Romeo)), but I wonder how interesting it is to those who think of books as little more than something to utilize while killing time between travel destinations or while getting a suntan. Brain and eyeball exercise no more relevant to shaping personal, social, and political reality than doing a crossword puzzle.
Therein lies the crux of the dilemma for reclusive writer Bill Gray, an aging author with two cult classics to his name, but who hasn't been seen or heard from in ages. He lives in seclusion with a personal assistant and a spaced-out former Moonie who they sexually share. He's been working on his "next" book for years, writing and rewriting, unable to get it right. The real problem, you sense, is that he's lost faith in "writing" as a vocation altogether. Does a lone man writing words on a page far away from the clatter and clamor of the world, the guns and the bombs, the movements and militias, have any effect on the world at all?
Enter Bill's old editor and a plan to use the mystique of Bill Gray in exchange for the freedom of an unknown poet who's been taken hostage by a charismatic terror leader somewhere in Beirut. It's a plot device that seems pretty far-fetched and out-of-place in the work of a "serious" writer like DeLillo, something you'd expect in a Robert Ludlum novel. But DeLillo is indulging in a bit of symbolism here, and, indeed, on another level, just why is such a plot point so preposterous anyway, if not precisely because it proves DeLillo's ultimate point: no one gives a damn about writers or their ideas anymore. The individual, so much as he can effect any change whatsoever, has become lost in the movement of great masses, subordinated to symbolic leaders, who lend their face to the faceless and guide them en mass to powerful, sweeping, and dramatically violent gestures that make headlines.
At the center of *Mao II* there is an exchange between Bill Gray and the terrorist go-between--a bit of literary theorizing that offers the idea that terrorism is the latest and most innovative form of the novel, or, perhaps more accurately, what has been taken up after the novel failed, the new form of expression now in currency to speak for the suffering in the world. As a writer, Bill Gray, and you'd assume DeLillo himself, reject this theory, but it's intriguing nonetheless, even if it is self-aggrandizing and egomaniacal in a way only writers can be.
In the end, it's a credit to DeLillo's power as a novelist that he makes this foray into political thriller territory believable--at least long enough to get you past it to the real, and more realistic, punch of this soul-searching book. It's amazing how prescient and prophetic DeLillo was, even back in the early 90s, with regard to the significance of terrorism in the future of geopolitics--a future that is now. From questioning the role of art to casting doubt about the value of the individual, *Mao II* is a haunting and powerful indictment of our contemporary world and our place, if any, in it.
Kaleidescopic novel of ideas.......2006-09-30
Mao II is a short novel - just over two hundred pages of widely spaced prose. But it encompasses more material than many novels of five hundred pages or more. It begins with the big picture - a superomniscient portrait of a Moonie wedding, a precursor of the panoramic style Delillo used to open his next novel, the massive Unverworld. Then it zooms in on the miniature with a man in a bookshop, pondering the novels of the reclusive novelist Bill Gray, a silk screen 'Crowd', and images of Mao by Warhol. As the novel unwraps, a series of voices, obscure yet real, come into focus.
Here Delillo is using his artistic powers to use a number of popular culture images, from the media, from art, from literature to develop a portrait that is not quite contemporary society (Delillo is far more intelligent and subtle a writer than to fall into the journalist as novelist trap, recording the surfact of what is there, but none of the deeper meaning), but a sombre series of images that gets under the skin of what modern people think and know. The juxtaposition of crowds, the individual identity lost in a huge mass, contrasts with the rugged loner intellect - the reclusive Bill Gray who is stalled on his latest novel and who builds up his fame and mystique by his failure to publish. The figure of the huge novelist pales and diminishes as the novel develops. Concerned by the failure of writers to make an impact on contemporary society where the terrorist shapes history in far greater a manner, Bill is persuaded by his gregarious publisher friend to travel to the Lebanon to help force the release of a mysterious poet hostage. Reluctantly, he agrees, shifting away from the pattern of a lifetime in which he refuses to involve himself in public events. The plan is a disaster. Bill decays before the reader's eyes. The best scenes are those narrated from inside Bill's head as he ponders the traffic on the roads, throwaway lines from his father that have lodged in his memory: 'Measure your head before ordering'. Bill dies, ill and depressed, and we never find out what happens to the hostage, although the themes of the novel - terrorist as shaper of the modern consciousness, gunfire in Lebanon - can't help but lodge strongly in the memory of the reader as he or she surveys the current geopolitical landscape.
At its best, Delillo's narrative is on a par with Joyce's best stuff, as he attempts to write out the multilayered human experience in the world as accurately and closely as any writer can. At its worst, Mao II lapses into the anodyne 'novel of ideas' category, with characters simply robotic moutpieces for philosophical and political ideas that are best explored in non fiction. In hindsight, Mao II seems like a trial run for Underworld, in which Delillo's full powers of mapping the American human experience of the past century are unleashed to their full, sprawling and brilliant effect. Mao II is to Underworld what Nabokov's 'The Enchanter' was to 'Lolita'. The early, imperfect working out of a novel, that matures into a much greater, later masterpiece.
Book Description
Spanning some of the most tumultuous and storied decades of American history, this account of one man's political life touches on what it takes to lead a revolution and how such a leader is made. Bob Avakian, radical activist and communist leader, takes readers into his 1950s, middle-class past with tales of attending an integrated high school, an experience that profoundly altered his worldview. From there, he traces his path into the heady whirl of 1960s Berkeley, where he engaged with revolutionaries of all stripes. Revealing insights gained from politics, music, sports, study, and late-night bull-sessions, this dissection of the experiences that formed and informed Avakian looks back at a galvanizing history, and forward to a possible future of revolutionary change. His story offers a rare picture of what it is like to lead a revolutionary party in the most powerful country in the world.
Customer Reviews:
Beyond politics?.......2006-04-30
The importance of critical thinking is an important theme of "From Ike to Mao and Beyond." This approach influenced Bob Avakian's development in the transformation he went through as an individual. He was going along with his life, with a middle class background, and then he began to change.
There were 3 main themes that influenced his life: communism, socialism, and the civil rights movement (that caused Avakian to critically assess the differences between true human rights and those countenanced by the forces of familial and popular social custom).
Bob Avakian's lived experiences illuminate situations that one can learn from: not readily accepting whatever one is told or observes others doing, but questioning such practices. Does one want a better quality versus more quantity out of life? Should simple human dignity not be at the forefront of this demand for a better quality of life? Avakian's book illuminates how one individual learned to want more out of life - did not know how to get it - and eventually found a way to have it.
One example of Bob Avakian looking for the truth was described in the book when Kennedy made a speech during the Cuban Missile Crisis incident in Cuba. He said the U.N. charter forbade the Soviet Union from having missiles in Cuba. Bob Avakian went to look up the U.N. Charter, read it several times and found out he had been lied to.
As a professor, I want my students to be critical thinkers and question lies masked as concerns for the "common good." In order to become critical thinkers, I believe that my students must be exposed to all - and I mean all - opinions regardless of the issue. This book can open people up to an approach of how to look at things with a critical eye: be self-reflexive and examine the footprints that the mere practice of one's own culture might leave upon others, and ask and answer truthfully, whether or not this is the impression that one seeks to leave.
My mom who is from the South has commented that growing up there you understood where you stood because people would just come out and say what they thought. People like George Wallace (an extremely racist former Governor of Alabama) would just outright say he thought Blacks were inferior. Whereas in the North there would be a covering up of how people thought. I have experienced the latter myself in California.
During the Civil rights period, people felt deeply that there needed to be a change and they were willing to do something about it. They had to "step outside of the box" and be willing to go out and dare to struggle for something different with different people. They did not know the outcome of what would happen if they did this. That is what is needed today. People need to take risks and not accept what's going on, especially where the common good is concerned. Bob Avakian did this with his life. He was looking for the truth and he has pursued that, not knowing where that would lead him, taking risks.
I was talking to a friend about the memoir, and my friend said, "Dude. This is communism you're talking about." I said, "Look into it. Did you ever read the Communist Manifesto? Communism on paper is a beautiful thing, just like capitalism;however, what the sleeze that people engage in in practice tells more about the problems of the system than the system itself. Just because things happened in Russia or China that weren't good, you shouldn't reject it. Is there not a capitalist counterpart? Capitalism has very wealthy people, a middle class, but a lot of people are two paychecks away from poverty. Under capitalism there are a few people who hoard all the wealth and incredible numbers of homeless." After this back and forth, my friend is now reading the book. I believe people can get drawn into the story from a humanistic approach (regardless of whether or not they are communist).
If you go through Bob's story, you get to see how he came to discover socialism and communism, and how the positives of these systems that might benefit people in this country in practice; hence encouraging the creation of new humanistic models for the improvement on life for all Americans. The students need to read this. While they may not agree with Avakian's politics - and it is not written anywhere that they have to - they may agree with the humanity that Avakian found by questioning and sifting through the hidden evils of unexamined social custom.
A Communist Cultist.......2006-01-08
Bob Avakian's memoir has its moments, but they are all at the beginning before Avakian is twisted into accepting Maoist Communism.
The author, still a revolutionary Communist today (who really thinks a revolution is going to happen), accepts a brand of Marxism known as "Maoism" for its complete adherence to the thoughts of Mao Tse-Tung.
The memoir tracks his thinking from, as the title suggests, "Ike to Mao." It may be hard to believe there are people who think Mao was a great man - but here is one.
Avakian comes across in his writings on "racism" as a racist himself. Bottom line: he hates white people. Yet, Avakian himself is white! His philosophy can be summed up pretty simply, take the bottom-feeders of society who live off handouts from the government (the same government Avakian seems to hate so much) and twist their thinking into accepting a bizarre, cultish Communist organization. He likes to be called their "Chairman"....sound familiar?
Like I said, the book has its moments at the beginning and slowly degrades into a long explanation as to how he became a Maoist Communist with beliefs that most will have a hard time believing are still even around today.
I rate this a 1 for promoting silly ideas that most of us outgrow by age 19 or so. This book is the life of an aging hippie who never grew up and clings to the ideas of the Black Panthers of the sixties, a group which he praises and thinks is wonderful.
I'll give the first couple of chapters a 3. Some of it was interesting. But the rest is just plain weird from the "Chairman" of The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.
absolutly incredible.......2005-05-02
Just finished it, and I must say, this is the most fun I've ever had from learning so much. Avakian really goes into explaining his entire development of thought, while at the same time taking you through the really exciting experiences of his life.
Really, really good.......2005-03-08
The writing style is easy to read, yet it is also very deep, the way he brings in the broader world that is affecting his development as a youth, the way he deals with his life-threatening illness (spoiler - he doesn't turn to God), and the entire last third of the book where he lays out his becoming a revolutionary, including his serious questions about communism and how people argued with him. It really shows a development of a human being and a Revolutionary Party.
As a second note, I've never seen a Memior that is quite so, well, personal, as some of the things he includes in his life most people would dismiss or not admit too, yet they all add up to his whole appraoch to life. And some of the things which he makes note of are really quite funny!
Cornel West.......2005-02-22
"Bob Avakian is a long distance runner in the freedom struggle against imperialism, racism and capitalism. His voice and witness are indispensable in our efforts to enhance the wretched of the earth. And his powerful story of commitment is timely."
Cornel West, Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion, Princeton University
Average customer rating:
- A lesson in strength, survival, a positive attitude and faith.
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Rescued by Mao: World War II, Wake Island, and My Remarkable Escape to Freedom Across Mainland China
William Taylor
Manufacturer: Silverleaf Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 1933317876 |
Book Description
For the first time ever, Bill Taylor shares his story of escape as a prisoner of war during World War II. This biography details Taylor’s astonishing experiences as a prisoner of war, an escapee, a wanderer through a strange land, and his eventual meeting with the famous Communist leader, Mao Zedong. This fascinating and engaging story shares the life of a war hero who was the only World War II prisoner of war to successfully escape, inspiring readers by revealing the personal strength and courageous adventures of a lone survivor.
Customer Reviews:
A lesson in strength, survival, a positive attitude and faith........2007-05-29
In 'Rescued By Mao,' author and survivor William Taylor recounts his own experiences as a Wake Island contractor, defender, prisoner of the Japanese and escapee.
Taylor's journey is a lesson in strength, survival, a positive attitude and faith. Most stories, especially those of POWs, reveal a certain 'trick' or 'technique' that these men used to overcome overwhelming experiences. Taylor's was his faith. Taylor found a solid testimony in his original faith in the LDS Church amidst the horrors of the Japanese Capture of Wake Island.
Born to a prominent Mormon family, Taylor lost his way for a time following his father's death during the Great Depression, but a friend and fellow contractor at Wake helped him renew his faith. Beyond Taylor's religious restoration, the story is indeed a well written first-hand account of the American POW experience. Taylor seems to have fared better in Japanese captivity than some of his fellow prisoners, parlaying some of his bad habits for valuable resources like food or clothing.
He gives a fair evaluation of the Japanese who imprisoned him, the Chinese who both helped and hindered his escape and the American leadership that surrendered him along with many less willing others. Taylor gives credit to Commander Winfield Cunningham, the Wake Island Navy commander for the early military successes, but is critical of Admiral Pye, (the interim Pacific Commander following Admiral Kimmel`s dismissal) and his abandonment of the garrison calling him a "complete failure."
The American pre-war intelligence about possible Japanese intentions in the Pacific is also a contentious subject for Taylor. He`s certainly earned the right to criticize, but analysis by scholars like Gregory Urwin and Robert Cressman provide overwhelming evidence of the futility of any planned relief effort for the embattled Wake garrison.
Much of the story revolves around the POW experience. Mao plays only a extraneous role in the story considering the book's title, merely posing for a picture with the author. The real credit for Taylor's rescue should be given Taylor's own self-determination and perhaps even a little Divine Intervention.
REVIEW EVERY BOOK YOU READ, AUTHHORS DESERVE YOUR OPINIONS TOO!
Book Description
Revolution In The Air is the first in-depth study of the long march of the US New Left after 1968. It tells the story of the 'new communist movement' which was the most racially integrated and fast-growing movement on the Left. Thousands of young activists, radicalized by the Vietnam War and Black Liberation, and spurred on by the Puerto Rican, Chicano and Asian-American movements, embraced a Third World oriented version of Marxism. These admirers of Mao, Che and Amilcar Cabral organized resistance to the republican majorities of Nixon and Ford. By the 1980s these groups had either collapsed or become tiny shards of the dream of a Maoist world revolution. Taking issue with the idea of a division between an early 'good sixties' and a later 'bad sixties,' Max Elbaum is particularly concerned to reclaim the lessons of the new communist movement for today's activists who, like their sixties' predecessors, are coming of age at a time when the Left lacks mass support and is fragmented along racial lines.
Customer Reviews:
Important Movement History, Critical Lessons for Today.......2003-06-16
Revolution in the Air fills a huge gap by giving today's activists and students access to previously unrecorded history of the rise and fall of the post-60s New Communist Movement. A leading organizer of one wing of the movement, Elbaum explains why so many '60s movement activists turned to revolutionary politics from 1968 to 1973 and then tells what they did in the 70s and 80s. He highlights the strengths and insights of the movement that have been left out of the historical record, while providing a balanced, critical and self-critical accounting of its weaknesses. Unlike many other many other 60s books, it gives due attention to 60s-generated revolutionaries from all sectors, particularly to movements in communities of color.
For young activists and more experienced ones trying to get our bearings in a right-wing world, Elbaum's book offers positive lessons about what we should learn from the new communist movement's experience -- like its emphasis on anti-imperialism and anti-racism -- and mistakes we should avoid. Especially important is Elbaum's argument that the New Communist Movement inaccurately assessed the historical conditions they faced, leading them to wrongly prioritize party-building and internecine warfare on the left over building a broad movement of resistance to the right.
The book is accessible, engaging, and clear. It relies heavily on written materials from the movement's organizations. More interviews with activists from the period would have strengthened the book, but this is a minor quibble. Overall, this book is one of the best I've read on the radicals of the 60s and what today's radicals have to learn from them.
Little Insight into Lived Experience.......2003-04-19
Elbaum begins his book with the insurgent promise of 1968. Together with other forms of rebellion the Tet offensive in Vietnam and Black rebellions in more than 100 cities, with flames reaching six blocks from the Whitehouse, meant that "For several years after 1968 the US could not conduct business as usual." Radicals who were not yet born at this time and who will never have the opportunity to visit the US are often inspired by accounts of this opening in American politics. Malcolm X's biography and George Jackson's prison diary remain, for example, standard reading for many young radicals from Gaza to Johannesburg.
Elbaum goes on to show how many young people radicalised in the late 60's moved towards a range of small Leninist organisations that he collectively identifies as the New Communist Movement. This new movement distinguished itself from the American Communist Party by its focus on the third world, and often China in particular, (as oppose to the USSR) and by its commitment to anti-racism in the US and internationalism abroad. Elbaum estimates that by the mid 70's the number of cadres had grown to almost 10 000 and he explains that many of these people subordinated themselves absolutely to the discipline of their organisations - often taking up jobs in factories and committing a major part of their time, skills and resources to building organisations that they hoped would develop into vanguardist parties. But sectarianism, fundamentalism and authoritarianism took a high toll on the movement during the late seventies and early eighties and although there were still enough cadres around to help to build Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition in the late eighties the movement effectively collapsed with the Berlin wall and cadres, often exhausted and disillusioned, had to adjust to civilian life.
Elbaum gives his readers very little insight in to the lived experience of life in New Communist Movement organisations or the workplaces and communities in which the Movement worked and struggled. This book is primarily a mapping of the trajectories of various communist sects and will certainly be useful to anyone seeking an account of the rise, fall, ideological commitment, structure and strategy of these sects.
Elbaum affirms the movement's commitment to anti-racism and internationalism and is critical of its aggressive factionalism, authoritarianism and "never ending quest for orthodoxy and constant suspicion of heresy." His affirmation of the movement's anti-racism is persuasive but his affirmation of its internationalism is less persuasive. On occasion it seems that the movement's solidarity was with Communist leaders and parties in other countries rather than with the people and communities in those countries. His critiques of sectarianism, fundamentalism and authoritarianism are merely noted, briefly, and are not explored in any significant depth. He says that they are unfortunate but does not make a serious attempt to theorise why these pathologies were so persuasive in the movement or to think a way through them. In fact he is often quite defensive and is even dismissive when he writes that "every tendency from left to right...made errors" or that these "afflictions...can be rationalized by a multitude of ideological prescriptions." He doesn't take seriously the possibility that the New Communist Movement made a particular and ultimately fatal error by taking `Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought' and its high priests as a transcendent end in-itself at the expense of an understanding and engagement with the actual struggles of actual people. He mentions that Fanon's Wretched of the Earth was an influential text but doesn't consider Fanon's commitment to thought and action on the plane of immanence and to the view that an authentic consciousness must recognise that "the unemployed man, the starving native do not lay a claim to the truth; they do not say that they represent the truth, for they are the truth." When Fanon insists, further on in the same book, that "the tool never posses the man" he means that theory and political ideology are tools with no value in-themselves and must, therefore, be subordinated to humanity just as firmly as any machine in any factory. Although Elbaum writes about cadres' commitment to the American working class and communities of color, a commitment that was solid enough for cadres to be murdered by the Klan and agents of the Marcos dictatorship, he gives us no real sense of these people or their struggles. The real focus is always on the organisations and their theoretical disputes. In fact he often slips in to a discourse that assumes or explicitly states that the success of Marxist ideas or organisations rather than transformative action towards social justice is what really matters. For example he celebrates the success of the South African Communist Party in being a key part of the alliance that took power after apartheid. But in the realm of lived experience the South African Communist Party is widely acknowledged to be an authoritarian force that intervenes to defend bougoise nationalism and neo-liberalism from much more militant and democratic community movements and trade unions independent of the party. Its success may have been good for Communism's scoreboard but it has been a disaster for the poor in South Africa. And, indeed, Elbaum does not have one word to say about what the South African Communist Party has actually done for the oppressed in South Africa. It seems that his politics is more ontological - one must be communist - rather than a practical commitment to effective, transformative struggle.
Elbaum's book is strangely empty of actual people, communities and struggles. The absence of a substantial account of the desires and hopes of the cadres in these organisations and their struggles means that the book is, to a significant degree, a rather arid collection of lists of acronyms and publications and dates and events. I cannot imagine anyone being inspired by this book. But it certainly does give a comprehensive overview of the various organisations and sects that made up the New Communist Movement.
A Well Thought Out Chronicle, If Uneven.......2003-01-07
Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air is a book that should be mandatory reading for any activist in any movement today. Unlike most books on sixties-era radicalism, Elbaum's chronicle of the era is refreshing for its lack of sentimentalism or blanket condemnations. For the purpose of this book, Elbaum refers to the mainstream of the radical current as the "New Communist Movement" - groups organized (and often patterned) after Chinese and other Third World communist movements.
The best parts of this book essentially center around the time at which Students for a Democratic Society was hitting its stride and breaking new ground for activists. Elbaum gives an idea of what materially made that possible - the unprecedented white middle class prosperity that allowed for full time organizers to work, the contradictions within the Democratic Party, and the international scene.
Elbaum also conveys the anguish over the feuding that came after the Progressive Labor Party entered into SDS, and does so in a much more objective manner than ex-SDS members David Horowitz (who has since become a neo-conservative) or Todd Gitlin (who has since given up radicalism for left liberalism). For instance, Elbaum shows how complex issues became during the fights between the Weatherman faction (later, the Weather Underground) and the PLP faction of SDS; how the issues of race, gender, and the Vietnam War became polarizing factors that neither was willing to give up ground on.
In general, the chapters that follow trace the paths of New Communist Movement party groups. While it certainly is instructive, especially with regard to the blunders of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Communist Party - Marxist Leninist, it does suffer from a lack of listed sources. I would better trust Elbaum's recollection of the RCP attempting to shake down writers of the Guardian newspaper were a source named. Otherwise, it just seems like sour grapes.
The later chapters, which cover the period following the creation of Elbaum's own group, Line of March, to modern day are schizophrenic at best. It provides a good understanding of how the Rainbow Coalition helped galvanize the better part of the New Communist Movement, and how a good portion later split after the death of Mao and fall of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, I think far too much energy is wasted on describing the in-jokes of Line of March, while neglecting to provide a good idea of how Third World solidarity groups came into existence as descendents of the New Communist Movement.
Overall, I think that Elbaum provided a good introduction to what foundation the left stands on today. It would be best, however, for those whose interest Revolution In the Air piques to investigate the groups by experience.
An informative and factual book.......2002-07-01
I found Max Elbaum's book on the New Communist Movement (NCM) interesting and informative. Max's factual and historical account of the rise and fall of the NCM is helpful for those of us who lived through it and can be valuable for today's young radicals. His attention to detail and analysis of what went wrong were compelling. His description of the heady days of the surge in mass movements and their precipitous decline provided the backdrop for the voluntarism and dogmatism of the NCM.
I came into the movement at a time when Third World revolutions headed by Marxists seemingly had U.S. imperialism on the ropes. As a African American activist, I was greatly influenced by the struggles and revolutionaries from Guinea Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa and Namibia. I and many others espoused the "Third World Marxism" that Max writes about.
More time could have been spent in the book on the influence of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party on budding revolutionaries of the time. I would have also liked more discussion on the role of the FBI's COINTELPRO in infiltrating and disrupting organizations.
Overall Max's book helped me to take a step back and understand the contributions and failings of the NCM. I would recommend this book to anyone trying to understand the history of the left in the U.S.
Good History of the NCM But Poor Advice to Activists.......2002-06-03
A must read. This is an ambitious book, although too ambitious for a single volume. There is more than enough material here for two books: a history of the Maoist movement, and then a second book concerning Max Elbaums's advice to the young activists of today's mass movements. I liked the first part of the book. I hated the second part, which is tendentious and annoying.
Max Elbaum became the principal leader of Line of March (LOM) after the fall of its charismatic founder, Bruce Oceana. This book is, more or less, the official Line of March history of the New Left, in that it reflects the consensus thinking of Max and his circle of comrades from the defunct LOM who remain engaged in politics and loosely consolidated around their old political line. Their main current project is the War Times newspaper.
The first part of the book is a fair-minded account of the rise of the Maoist parties of the 1970s. This is a story that has not been told before. Max is scrupulously fair in describing the political controversies and the ideological contests between the groups. This is, in my opinion, an important contribution to the history of 1970s activism that will now be accessible to everyone. I wish it had been dealt with in more depth.
The second part, the lessons learned from the New Communist Movement (NCM), represents the consensus post-LOM cadre view on politics, organization, and ideology. These views are presented in the form of "lessons" Max learned in his analysis of the failures of the New Communist Movement. These lessons happen to be identical to the views that the LOM circle held before Max began work on the book. I did not like this part of the book because I disagree with the analysis.
Oddly, the lessons for the movement, presented at the end of the book, undercut the avowed central thesis of the book -- a critique of the "good 1960s/bad 1960s" thesis that Revolution in the Air overtly attacks but ends up reinforcing! Max's final summation, in the form of his final advice to today's activists, is that the New Communist Movement was in fact fatally dogmatic, intolerant, etc. Here in Max's own words, is his final condemnation of the bad 1960s NCM, as it appears on the last page of his book, "But they became mired in dogmatist orthodoxy and moralistic intolerance, reproducing the worst traits of their predecessors instead of their strengths. They ended up making party building a fetish and constructed only sects." P. 338.
The reason, I think, for the disconnect between Max's intention of criticizing the good/bad 1960s line, but his failure to consistently do so, is the essentially social democratic line on working class organization that Max shares with Todd Gitlin and other non-Marxist critics of the NCM. Max (and the ex-LOM) believes that it is "premature" to attempt to build Leninist parties when there is no radical mass working class movement that can serve as a corrective to the sterile ideological insularity of a self proclaimed vanguard party. This is a huge problem in a backward superpower like the USA. But what is the value, for today's activists, of the existing body of ML literature from the last century? Very little value in Max's view. The repeated criticism of dogmatism, and, especially, Max's use of the straw man of Stalin's book "Marxism and the National Question", is to dismiss essentially all of Lenin's contributions to the theory of nations under imperialism, plays to the anti-intellectualism and the anarchist and anti-working class prejudices of many of today's young activists.
A final criticism of Max's book about the failure of the left is that it dodges the central issue surrounding the collapse of our movement. That issue is, was Gorbachev right or wrong? It was Gorbachev's reforms that led to the unraveling of Soviet Communism and shattered the American left too. Revolution in the Air is silent on whether the reforms were a good thing or a bad thing. The book mentions that they happened, that LOM supported Gorbachev, but that is all.
How can a book that purports to provide lessons for today's activists omit an analysis of the central event in the history of the movement the book chronicles? The answer, I think, is that Max does not have an answer to the Gorbachev question. For the soft left milieu of the ex LOM cadres, ex-CPUSA people like the CoC, and some others, the issue of the collapse of Communism, and especially the role Gorbachev played, remains, ten years after the event, a serious and unresolved ideological issue!
The final sections of the book, and especially the tendentious and, I think, incorrect "lessons" mar the really interesting early chapters on New Left history. Despite the flaws, this is a must read book. There is no other history of the period that is done as carefully, as fairly, and as well as this one.
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Artificial Neural Nets. Problem Solving Methods: 7th International Work-Conference on Artificial and Natural Neural Networks, IWANN 2003, Maó, Menorca, ... Part II (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
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The two-volume set LNCS 2686 and LNCS 2687 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Work-Conference on Artificial and Natural Neural Networks, IWANN 2003, held in Maó, Menorca, Spain in June 2003.
The 197 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book and address the following topics: mathematical and computational methods in neural modelling, neurophysiological data analysis and modelling, structural and functional models of neurons, learning and other plasticity phenomena, complex systems dynamics, cognitive processes and artificial intelligence, methodologies for net design, bio-inspired systems and engineering, and applications in a broad variety of fields.
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Classic Chinese Short Stories, Vol. II
Yuan Chen ,
Tu Kwang-Tíng ,
Feng Meng-lung ,
Lien Pu ,
Hsieh Liang , and
Mao Tun
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1 MP3 CD, Unabridged, With Music and Sound Effects, Running Time: 5 hours 23 minutes Chinese literature offers the most satisfying glimpse into the mysterious and beautiful civilization of China of any other means at our disposal. But we discover in its pages the same human conditions which color our own cultures. Love, revenge, betrayal, honor...they all bring our humanity into sharper focus, cutting through the confusion of nationality to draw us closer together with a celebration of our similarities. From the 8th Century Tang Dynasty to the present day, Chinese authors have continued their quest to define the family of man.
Selections in Volume II: PASSION by Yuan Chen - Autobiographical in nature, this is the story of a man who wins the love of a woman, only to abandon her. CURLY BEARD by Tu Kwang-Tíng - When a man vies for power, will he eschew his attempt when he realizes the Fates are not on his side? WINE AND DUMPLINGS by Feng Meng-lung - The most unlikely of men is called to a position of honor. MADAM D by Lien Pu - This tale of repressed desire and feminine longing is probably the most perfect of its type ever written. THE WOLF OF CHUNGSHAN by Hsieh Liang - In this remarkable fable, we understand more fully the maxim "kill or be killed." SPRING SILKWORMS AND AUTUMN HARVEST by Mao Tun - These two poignant stories actually form one long narrative about a peasant in modern China whose commitment to honor and devotion to tradition runs headlong into the behemoth of modernism.
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1974 First Edition Random House. 6.25 x 9.5 x 1.5 inches. 409 pages.
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48 color plates by Yang Mao-Lin. Includes introductory text. All text in both English and Chinese.
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Mao II
Don DeLillo
Manufacturer: Viking, 1991
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Mao II
Don DeLillo
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- Mark of the Lion : A Voice in the Wind, An Echo in the Darkness, As Sure As the Dawn (Vol 1-3)
- Mrs. Jeffries and the Best Laid Plans
- Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel (P.S.)
- Never Cry Wolf : Amazing True Story of Life Among Arctic Wolves
- Now or Neverland: Peter Pan and the Myth of Eternal Youth : A Psychological Perspective on a Cultural Icon (Studies in Jungian Psychology, 82)
- Operating System Concepts
- Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe
- Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments
- Physik (Septimus Heap, Book 3)
- Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy: Modern Herbal Medicine
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Cosmopolis: A Novel [Bargain Price] [Hardcover] by Delillo, Don
