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Title: Joe Hill: The Iww & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture by Franklin Rosemont ISBN: 0-88286-264-2 Publisher: Charles H Kerr Pub Co Pub. Date: January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Tracing the life of the Wobbly bard
Comment: This is a huge and wonderful book, full of the details of Joe Hill's life. Many aspects of the life and lore of Joe Hill receive their first and only discussion in this 642-page opus. Frustrated academics often rail at the little supporting documentation surrounding the lives of working class heros, from blues singers to union organizers, and they often abandon ship in the face of such frustration. But Rosemont has had the endurance to follow every trail leading to and from Joe Hill, and we the readers are much richer for it. It's also a mini-history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and their relationship to the arts, poetry, feminism, cops, Stalinism, the Beats and more. There's even a chapter discussing Joe Hill myths! Profusely illustrated with IWW and Joe Hill graphics, this book will give you hours of enjoyable reading.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the best IWW books- Buy two copies
Comment: I grew up with stories of the IWW permiating my family. They were legendary do gooders (mom's side of the family) and absolute evil (dad's). I choose mom's view. This book of several dozen short essays on the IWW and Joe Hill is one of the best I've ever read on the subject. And I have most every book written on the subject and several file drawers full of photocopies to boot.
Rosemont uses Joe Hill, the world's most famious wobbly, as a reason not only for the book but as a muse. The stories of Joe Hill, often from older wobblies who actually knew Joe Hill, are excellent and often the only place where you can find them.
But most of the book uses Hill as a muse to reflect on Rosemonts' own experiences as an IWW, and more importantly, the experiences of other IWWs he has known. For example, in my faourite article, Rosemont starts with the fact that Joe Hill was an accomplished Chinese cook. He asks the question, why? That leads to historic documents and personal recolections which discuss the IWW's affinity for Chinese cooking as a solidarity effort with chinese workers being discriminated against by the AFL, et all.
Sure there are aspects of speculation in Rosemonts book. So what? He knew dozens of old IWWs as a young man and knows their unwritten histories. I knew half a dozen old wobs when I was a young man and Franklin Rosemont's book rings true, its just like the stories old wobblies told me. This is the stuff, as they would say.
This book is so much better than an academic history. They are dead and dry. This book is fun, a delight, a living history, an oral history. From my long experience with the IWW (25 or so years) as well as the stories told to me by the first generation of wobblies, this book is spot on the money. This is a real IWW history, told in an IWW manner.
Buy two copies, one to read, one to lend.
Rating: 2
Summary: Well, his heart was in the right place.
Comment: There are parts of this book which are utterly engrossing. Rosemont constructs a fine narrative of events. Perhaps I should say "events", as it is at times researched like a eighth-grade paper. Lots of conjecture, unsupported speculation, hearsay and other aspects of irresponsible scholarship. Mr. Rosemont freely admits that there is frustratingly little concrete evidence about much of Hill's life, but he chooses to try and flesh out a lengthy book anyways. This is exasperating at times as when one is forced to try and endure each and every tedious mentioning of the drawn or painted art of Joe Hill, despite the lack of much actual material (surviving anyways). However, by doing this he touches on many peripheral aspects of Hill's life that have gone by and large unnoticed till now, but which are much easier to verify than the sketchy details about Hill himself. Several mentions of correspondence, lives affected by Hill, and reactions to Hill's art, and many others tidbits of information are thrown out for more or less the first time in cohesive form. Less cohesive, and downright teasing at times, are many starts and stops of several ideas that would be very interesting on their own. The Wobbly influence on the beat poets, the slighting of the IWW by other revolutionary and pseudorevolutionary groups (rarely written about from a fellow worker's perspective), and others seem like promising beginnings for reading but then are waded into only ankle-deep. At one point when abandoning a topic Mr. Rosemont even suggests that it would be a good idea for further research, by someone else. All in all a fairly decent read but could have used prodigious editing and some fact-checking with standards higher than those of the NY Times.
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Title: The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire by Mark Arax, Rick Wartzman ISBN: 1586480286 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin ISBN: 1566565529 Publisher: Interlink Pub Group Pub. Date: March, 2004 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project) by Noam Chomsky ISBN: 0805074007 Publisher: Metropolitan Books Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Love by TONI MORRISON ISBN: 0375409440 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 28 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present by Howard Zinn ISBN: 0060528370 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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