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The Memoirs 0f Satan by William Gerhardi and Brian Lunn. London. 1932. Cassell & Company. hardcover. 382 pages.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

SATAN narrates the epic of mankind and the part he has played therein. From the dim days of the remote Ice Age he watches the growth of the world, the coming of man, the part played by love and passion. He gives his version of the stories of Adam and Eve, the destruction of Sodom, the adventures of Jonah, the tribulation of Job ; he recalls the great days of history when he possessed Tiberius, Nero, the Caliph of Bagdad, Cromwell, Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, and many another. Finally, he arrives at a Bayswater boardinghouse, an old man and very weary. He has his last great adventure, makes his last possession, and then his mortal remains are taken for cremation to Golders Green. FROM Futurian War Digest, a sci-fi/fantasy fanzine published in Leeds during the Second World War by J. Michael Rosenblum – (from Issue 13 (Vol. 2, Number 1), dated October 1941: ‘The Memoirs of Satan’ collated by William Gerhardie and Brian Lunn, (Cassell & Co 1932) is a surprising sort of book altogether. According to this, Satan was a collaborator of God, chosen to look after this earth because of his free and independent spirit. Mankind is due to an infatuation of his for a primitive she-ape, and he continually bemoans the fact that he did not choose a more sensible animal, such as the whale, to half endow with his divine nature. Due to his failure with this planet, Satan is finally punished by the All-Highest with the withdrawal of his immortality, and he dies, leaving the notes of his eon-long existence in a Bloomsbury hotel.’

  William Alexander Gerhardie (1895-1977) was a British (Anglo-Russian) novelist and playwright. Gerhardie (or Gerhardi: he added the ‘e’ in later years as an affectation) was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s (Evelyn Waugh told him ‘I have talent, but you have genius’). H.G Wells was a ferocious champion of his work. His first novel Futility, was written while he was at Cambridge and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting (or attempting to fight) the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of ‘waiting’ later made famous by Samuel Beckett in WAITING FOR GODOT, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, THE POLYGLOTS is probably his masterpiece (although some argue for DOOM). Again it deals with Russia (Gerhardie was strongly influenced by the tragi-comic style of Russian writers such as Chekhov who he wrote a study of while in College). He collaborated with Hugh Kingsmill on the biography ‘The Casanova Fable’, his friendship with Hugh being both a source of conflict over women and a great intellectual stimulus. After World War II Gerhardie’s star waned, and he became unfashionable, and although he continued to write, he had nothing published after 1939. After a period of poverty-stricken oblivion, he lived to see two ‘definitive collected works’ published by Macdonald (in 1947-49 and then revised again in 1970-74). More recently, both Prion and New Directions Press have been reissuing his works. Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest ‘Pronounced jer (as Ger in Gerald) hardy, with the accent on the a: jer-har’dy. This is the way I and my relatives pronounce it, tho I am told it is incorrect. Philologists are of the opinion that it should be pronounced with the g as in Gertrude. I believe they are right. I, however, cling to the family habit of mispronouncing it. But I do so without obstinacy. If the world made it worth my while I would side with the multitude.’ (Charles Earle Funk, What’s the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936). 

 Brian Lunn (1893–1956) was a British writer. He was born in Bloomsbury, London to Methodist parents. He had a somewhat Puritanical upbringing, his father Henry Simpson Lunn (1859-1939, founder of Lunn's Travel agency that would become Lunn Poly) having strong religious beliefs which were in conflict with his talent as a businessman. Arnold Lunn and Hugh Kingsmill were his brothers. His most important work as a writer was 'Switchback', his autobiography published in 1948. Its highlight is Brian's description of a mental breakdown he had while serving in Mesopotamia in the 11th Black Watch. The onset of his breakdown was described as follows: 'Men and beasts passed through the haze, black outlines; a troup of mules with Indian driver was a stately silhouette; shambling after them a bucket-carrying menial with tousled turban and bedraggled shirt flapping round flexed knees was an immortal grotesque, raised above the plane of human need and anxiety. The Platonic Idea, as interpreted by Schopenhauer, the basis of art. Removed from all appeal to the will, the horrible was transmuted into the beautiful. He was, in fact, a sanitary man staggering back from a punishment fatigue; constantly in trouble, he would incur more fatigues, with stoppages of pay, staggering in the bog of inefficiency under implacable authority. ' '...I looked along the river banks - tents and incinerators, horses and mules, soldiers, native and European, a complex of endeavour in an enterprise as unreal as all the day-to-day needs and anxieties and discomforts, ambitions and humiliations of each individual, were real.' ‘Unreal? The word came back to me as a sudden illumination. That was it, it was all a staged show.' The delusions which accompanied this insight were hardly more absurd than the futilities of war. His other books were a biography of Martin Luther, a travel guide to Belgium and a history of the Rothschild family. "Salvation Dynasty" was Brian Lunn's account of the Salvation Army's founders.

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The Voices Of Guns: The Definitive & Dramatic Story Of The Twenty-Two-Month Career Of The Symbionese Liberation Army-One Of The Most Bizarre Chapters In The History Of The American Left by Vin McLellan and Paul Avery. New York. 1977. Putnam. hardcover. 388 pages. 0399117385.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Intimate, detailed, definitive - here is the complete account, the story behind the headlines, the sensational career of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a tiny cult of California revolutionaries, who captured the curiosity and imagination of millions and wrote one of the most bizarre chapters in the history of the American left. Here is an inside look - fleshed out and human - at this strange band of outsiders. THE VOICES OF GUNS plunges the reader into the emotional politics of radical Berkeley and San Francisco; introduces the SLA’s General Field Marshall Cinque, his ‘soldiers’ and victims, with intimate and revealing profiles; and unfolds the stark drama of the Patricia Hearst kidnapping in context. Dogged, resourceful reporters McLellan and Avery have done the impossible: they have rendered coherent the many paradoxes and contradictions of the SLA. Here are the never-before-published details of the Symbionese plots in the California prisons, the prison escapes they engineered, their recruitment and training, the details of their daily life, and their plans and dreams for the Revolution. Here is the history of the SLA, unexpurgated, from its inception at the Vacaville prison through its first bold, violent statement - the assassination of Dr. Marcus Foster - to its even more sensational next move: the kidnapping of Patricia Campbell Hearst. Here are the Hibernia Bank robbery, the Watts conflagration, the second bank robbery in Carmichael, the ‘safe houses’ in Pennsylvania, and the fantastic journeys across America. And here is the dramatic denouement in San Francisco - the arrests and trials of Bill and Emily Harris, Wendy Yoshimura, and Patty Hearst, feeble remnants of the ‘Army’ that wanted to change the world. This sensitive, politically astute, and exclusively documented account, factually and passionately written, fully explains what many have come to believe were, collectvely, the crimes of the century.

 Vin McLellan was a Boston journalist specializing in political and investigative reporting. He is the former city editor of The Phoenix, Boston’s major alternative weekly. Paul Avery, a veteran investigative reporter, covered the entirety of the SLA/Hearst story for the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber. New York. 2018. Simon & Schuster. 335 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by David Litman.  

DESCRIPTION - From bestselling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are millions of people - HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers - whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society's most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Rolfe Graeber (February 12, 1961 - September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist, anarchist activist, and author known for his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). He was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. As an assistant and later associate professor of anthropology at Yale University from 1998 to 2007, Graeber specialized in theories of value and social theory. Yale's decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy. He went on to become, from 2007 to 2013, reader in social anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His activism included protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and at the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan "We are the 99%". He accepted credit for the description "the 99%" but said that others had expanded it into the slogan.

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Fulcrums of Change: Origins of Racism in the Americas and Other Essays by Jan Carew. Trenton. 1988. Africa World Press. . 240 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION -  "Jan first novel Black Midas was a landmark in Caribbean literature. His best works are vivid and powerful social documents informed with his pristine magic and vitality. It is not just in the novel that he has made his mark He is the author of several plays, short stories, poems and essays published throughout the world.... His political insights and wide range of expertise have made him a confidant and advisor to several Prime Ministers in the Third World. He was the moving force behind the organization of African and African American programs at both Rutgers and Princeton.... Jan Carew has provided the stimulus for new departures and directions for thousands of students. I owe him much." - Ivan Van Sertima, author, They Came Before Columbus. "In this brilliant and original collection of essays, Jan Carew combines the lyricism of the poet with the breadth of the scholar. He writes with a clarity of vision that not only makes the past present, but draws our present from that past"  - A. Sivanandan, editor, Race & Class. "Fulcrums of Change represents Jan Carew, the polyglot griot of Africa, oppressed minorities, and pain - at his very best - fusing a path from ruins in a universe where those pressed the farthest down have always forced themselves to freedom. It is a collection of essays on racism, exile, Third Worldism and visions of future promise. For griot-Carew the truth simply is: therefore these wonder prose efforts read like scenes from a novel with bits and pieces of proverbs, songs, and poems interspersed among them. It is a rare testimony from a man who has been a part of so many of the changes shaping this century."  - Sterling D. Plumpp, University of Illinois at Chicago. "This is an important and pioneering work in a neglected area of study." Dennis Brutus, University of Pittsburgh.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jan Rynveld Carew (24 September 1920 – 6 December 2012) was a Guyana-born novelist, playwright, poet and educator, who lived at various times in The Netherlands, Mexico, the UK, France, Spain, Ghana, Jamaica, Canada and the United States. Carew's works, diverse in form and multifaceted, make Jan Carew an important intellectual of the Caribbean world. His poetry and first two novels, Black Midas and The Wild Coast (both published in 1958 by Secker & Warburg in London), were significant landmarks of Caribbean literature then attempting to cope with its colonial past and assert its wish for autonomy. Carew worked with the late Guyana President Cheddi Jagan in the fight for Guianese independence from Britain. He also played an important part in the Black power movement gaining strength in Britain and North America, publishing reviews and newspapers, producing programmes and plays for radio and television. His scholarly research drove him to question traditional historiographies and the prevailing historical models of the conquest of America. The way he reframed Christopher Columbus as a historical character outside his mythical hagiography became a necessary path in his mind to build anew the Caribbean world on sounder foundations.

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Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean. New York. 2017. Viking Press. 9781101980965. 334 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution. Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nancy MacLean is the award-winning author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry  (a New York Times "noteworthy" book of the year) and Freedom is Not Enough, which was called by the Chicago Tribune “contemporary history at its best.”The William Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, she lives in Durham, North Carolina.

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Bewitched Lands by Adolfo Costa Du Rels. New York. 1945. Knopf. Translated from the Spanish by Stuart Edgar Grummon. 204 pages. hardcover. Cover: Carlos Merida.

DESCRIPTION - BEWITCHED LANDS is a novel of conflicting passions and loyalties, a fascinating tale of long-latent - and at last overt-violence on a feudal hacienda deep in the lush, uncharted Chaco region of Bolivia. The principal characters of this unusual and sophisticated story are: Don Pedro Vidal, aging and absolute master of the vast isolated Hacienda El Mataral; Doña Maria de Vidal, his pretty, pathetic, and unhappy young wife; Carlos Vidal, Don Pedro's son by a former wife, dead under mysterious circumstances; Mr. Treweek, a very English petroleum prospector - and the sympathetic narrator. Carlos Vidal, educated at military school in France, has been paroled in his father's custody after participating in an abortive revolt against his country's dictator. He is in rebellion against the medieval social ideas dominating his native land and summed up in his own father. The arrival of Mr. Treweek and his companion, in search of the petroleum whose existence Don Pedro wishes to deny, galvanizes Carlos into emotions, thoughts, and at last actions that lead inevitably to a series of violent crises. In the fabric of this brilliantly colored novel, Carlos's love for his stepmother is but one thread.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Adolfo Costa du Rels (or Adolfo Costa du Reís) (1891–1980) was a Bolivian writer and diplomat who became the last President of the Council of the League of Nations. He was the author of many plays, novels and other writings, mostly in French, and received several literary awards. For much of his life, Costa du Rels made his home in Paris. According to the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld, Costa du Rels had the right to say of himself, as had Joseph de Maistre, ‘No foreigner is more French than me.' Costa du Rels died in La Paz in 1980. Costa du Rels wrote in both French and Spanish, and wrote poetry, plays, novels, short stories and essays.

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Utopia 14 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. New York. 1954. Bantam. 1st published in hardcover by Scribner in 1952 under the title CAT'S CRADLE. 312 pages. paperback. A1262.

DESCRIPTION - Man's revolt against a glittering, mechanized tomorrow... Here is the gripping story of one man's rebellion against a terrifying world of tomorrow - a machine-ruled America that threatens to make man obsolete. In the great tradition of 'Brave New World' and '1984' Kurt Vonnegut uses a strange and marvelous world of the future to tell of passions and conflicts that are ageless. Utopia 14 is, perhaps, Vonnegut's most accessible novel.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) was an American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. The New York Times headline at the time of Vonnegut's passing called Vonnegut ‘the counterculture's novelist.'

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Daughters of the Stone by Dahlma LLanos-Figueroa. New York. 2009. St. Martin's Press. 9780312539269. 325 pages. hardcover.  Jacket Design By David Baldeosingh Rotstein. Jacket Painting By Dudley Vaccianna.

  
DESCRIPTION - A lyrical, powerful debut novel about a family of Afro - Puerto Rican women spanning five generations, detailing their physical and spiritual journey from the Old World to the New. It is the mid-1800s. Fela, taken from Africa, is working at her second sugar plantation in colonial Puerto Rico, where her mistress is only too happy to benefit from her impressive embroidery skills. But Fela has a secret. Before she and her husband were separated and sold into slavery, they performed a tribal ceremony in which they poured the essence of their unborn child into a very special stone. Fela keeps the stone with her, waiting for the chance to finish what she started. When the plantation owner approaches her, Fela sees a better opportunity for her child, and allows the man to act out his desire. Such is the beginning of a line of daughters connected by their intense love for one another, and the stories of a lost land. Mati, a powerful healer and noted craftswoman, is grounded in a life that is disappearing in a quickly changing world. Concha, unsure of her place, doesn't realize the price she will pay for rejecting her past. Elena, modern and educated, tries to navigate between two cultures, moving to the United States, where she struggles to keep her family together. Carisa turns to the past for wisdom and strength when her life in New York falls apart. The stone becomes meaningful to each of the women, pulling them through times of crisis. Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa shows great skill and warmth in the telling of this heartbreaking, inspirational story about mothers and daughters, and the ways in which they hurt and save one another.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. She taught in the New York City school system before becoming a young-adult librarian. Dahlma has won the Bronx Council on the Arts ACE and BRIO awards, as well as a Literary Arts Fellowship. This is her first novel. She lives in the Bronx.

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Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King Jr. New York. 1964. Harper & Row. 178 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Written nearly thirty years ago, an impassioned work by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., shares a heartfelt argument for equality and an end to racial discrimination that explains why the civil rights struggle is vital to the United States. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), architect of the nonviolent civil rights movement, was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and one of the greatest orators in U.S. history. The author of several books, including STRIDE TOWARD FREEDOM, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE, and THE TRUMPET OF CONSCIENCE, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1954 through 1968. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using the tactics of nonviolence and civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs and inspired by the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and in 1957 became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). With the SCLC, he led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. He also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the following year he and the SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In his final years he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". J. Edgar Hoover considered him a radical and made him an object of the FBI's COINTELPRO from 1963 on. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one occasion mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide. In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee; riots followed in many U.S. cities. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971, and as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and a county in Washington State was also rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

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The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism by Richard Wolin. Princeton. 2004. Princeton University Press. 0691114641. 400 pages. hardcover.   

DESCRIPTION - Fifteen years ago, revelations about the political misdeeds of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man sent shock waves throughout European and North American intellectual circles. Ever since, postmodernism has been haunted by the specter of a compromised past. In this intellectual genealogy of the postmodern spirit, Richard Wolin shows that postmodernism's infatuation with fascism has been widespread and not incidental. He calls into question postmodernism's claim to have inherited the mantle of the left - and suggests that postmodern thought has long been smitten with the opposite end of the political spectrum. In probing chapters on C. G. Jung, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot, Wolin discovers an unsettling commonality: during the 1930s, these thinkers leaned to the right and were tainted by a proverbial ‘fascination with fascism.' Frustrated by democracy's shortcomings, they were seduced by fascism's grandiose promises of political regeneration. The dictatorships in Italy and Germany promised redemption from the uncertainties of political liberalism. But, from the beginning, there could be no doubting their brutal methods of racism, violence, and imperial conquest. Postmodernism's origins among the profascist literati of the 1930s reveal a dark political patrimony. The unspoken affinities between Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism constitute the guiding thread of Wolin's suggestive narrative. In their mutual hostility toward reason and democracy, postmodernists and the advocates of Counter-Enlightenment betray a telltale strategic alliance - they cohabit the fraught terrain where far left and far right intersect. Those who take Wolin's conclusions to heart will never view the history of modern thought in quite the same way. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His books, which have been translated into eight languages, include Heidegger's Children (Princeton) and Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. His work has also appeared in The New Republic and Dissent.

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