The autobiography of the early radical leader and her participation in communist, anarchist, and feminist activities

Finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Autobiography/Memoir Category "I was born in 1944, but raised in the twelfth century." With that, Joanna Clapps Herman neatly describes the two worlds she inhabited while growing up as the child of Italian American immigrants in Waterbury, Connecticut, a place embedded with values closer to Homer's Greece than to Anglo-American New England, where the ethic of hospitality was and still is more Middle Eastern and North African than Anglo-European, and where the pageantry and ritual were more pagan Mediterranean than Western Christian. It was also a place where a stuffed monkey wearing a fedora sat and continues to sit on her grandmother's piano, and a place where, when the donkey got stubborn and wouldn't plow the field, her grandfather bit the animal in a fury. In essays filled with wry humor and affectionate yet probing insights, Herman maps and makes palpable the very particular details of this culture—its pride and its shame, its profound loyalty and its Byzantine betrayals.

A radical anthropologist studies the global justice movement.

The Anarchist Cookbook will shock, it will disturb, it will provoke. It places in historical perspective an era when "Turn on, Burn down, Blow up" are revolutionary slogans of the day. Says the author" "This book... is not written for the members of fringe political groups, such as the Weatherman, or The Minutemen. Those radical groups don't need this book. They already know everything that's in here. If the real people of America, the silent majority, are going to survive, they must educate themselves. That is the purpose of this book." In what the author considers a survival guide, there is explicit information on the uses and effects of drugs, ranging from pot to heroin to peanuts. There i detailed advice concerning electronics, sabotage, and surveillance, with data on everything from bugs to scramblers. There is a comprehensive chapter on natural, non-lethal, and lethal weapons, running the gamut from cattle prods to sub-machine guns to bows and arrows.