The FE Bookstore is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit. We share space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and may be reached at the same phone number: (313) 831-6800. Visitors are welcome, but our hours vary so please call before dropping in.
HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:
1) List the title of the book, quantity wanted, and the price of each;
2) add 10% for mailing costs—not less than $1.05 U.S. or $1.60 foreign (Minimum for 4th class book rate postage):
3) total:
4) write check or money order to: The Fifth Estate;
5) mail to: The Fifth Estate, 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, MI 48201.
IN THE ABSENCE OF THE SACRED by Jerry Mander
Inspiring, sometimes gripping….Through Mander’s eyes, native peoples are not quaint relics; they become sources of precisely the practical wisdom our species needs not only for survival but for renewal.
—Francis Moore Lappe author of Diet for a Small Planet
An important synthesis of voices opposing the Western technological machine with those defending indigenous cultures that lie in its path
—Mary Wildwood from FE review
Sierra Club Books 446 pp. $14
AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGY: Technics out-of-control as a theme in political thought by Langdon Winner
Readers interested in technology, politics and social change will find Autonomous Technology a useful guide and a thoughtful inquiry into the relationship between technology and society. In it, Winner outlines the paradoxes of technological development, the images of alienation and liberation evoked by machines, and he assesses the historical conditions underlying the exponential growth of technology
M.I.T Press 386 pp. $11
FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION by Jerry Mander
Television doesn’t just have “bad” content, but changes how we perceive the world. Experience is no longer direct, but mediated by TV through centralized and unified images. The result is a loss of the sensuous world and a passive, easily manipulated population.
Quill 371 pp. $9.00
DEER CROSSING AND LEAP YEARS Away by William Boyer
With a knack for creating an interesting story and credible characters, Cass Corridor playwright William Boyer’s two plays “Deer Crossing” and “Leap Years Away” depict relationships suffused by memories that evoke the tragic, comic and surreal.
Ridgeway Press 128 pp. $7.50
WAR AFTER WAR: City Lights Review 5 Edited by Nancy J. Peters
Featuring contributions from Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Mander, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Noam Chomsky, and others, War After War is a Post-Desert Storm examination of the Gulf War atrocity “not as an isolated exploit but as one facet of an interrelated whole, including the culture of the Middle East, the course of colonialism, Zionism, and historic Palestine, and the plunder of the Third World; as well as its repercussions on the home’ front and the conflicts born in the abyss of failed social policies. The wars against the sick, the poor, the old, the young, the wars against democracy, against the arts, and above all the relentless war against the planet itself.
—from introduction
City Lights Review 273 pp. $12
BI ANY OTHER NAME: Bisexual People Speak Out Edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu
Rejected by both Gay and Straight worlds, bisexuals have been a community in exile. With this rich and varied collection, however, bisexual women and men step forward into their own historical spotlight. The writing here can only deepen our discussion about passion and politics.
—from jacket
Alyson Publ 379 pp. $12
SOCIETY AGAINST THE STATE by Pierre Clastres
Clastres’ seminal work of political anthropology is, in essence, a philosophical reflection on the nature, source, and historicity of power in primal societies, as understood by the disciplines of social anthropology and ethnology. ‘Through individual essays Clastres explores and situates Native American cultural practices within an economy of power and desire very different from the modern West; one whose most fundamental goal is to celebrate life while rendering the rise of despotic power impossible’.
Zone Books 218 pp. $11
ANARCHY OR CHAOS by George Woodcock
Written as World War Two raged around him, this is the first book (other than poetry) published by one of the most important anarchist thinkers of the twentieth century. While it is true, as Woodcock points out in a preface written just for this edition, that much of the book belongs to the time in which it was written that only adds to the power of the book for there is hardly a greater statist nightmare than World War Two. Knowledgeable, yet filled with youthful enthusiasm, this volume is as fine a brief history of anarchism as is available today.
—Michael Ziesing
Lysander Spooner 124 pp. $9.50
ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN Fredy Perlman
This compendium of Fredy Perlman’s shorter writings, the most important of them collected here, chart an intellectual exploration from the student (and other) revolutions of 1968, in which Fredy took part in France and Italy, to the ecological concerns of today. His insights into industrialism, the nation-state and imperialism, racism and genocide, the psychology of power and dependency, are some of the most important in recent libertarian thought.
Phoenix Press 127 pp. $9
THE MACHINE AGAINST THE GARDEN By Fredy Perlman
Written a few months before his death, this is Fredy’s angry reply to an essay by literary academician Leo Marx. Fredy vehemently objects to Marx’s attempt to turn critics of American society into its celebrants—specifically in this case, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In Fredy’s introduction to these two essays, he insists that “Melville, Hawthorne and Thoreau were profound critics of the technological society.” The texts first appeared in the Fall 1985 Fifth Estate. John Moore, author of Anarchy and Ecstasy, has edited them and contributed a five-page introduction.
Aporia Press 28 pp. $4
THE OLD WAYS by Gary Snyder
The wisdom and skill of those who studied the universe first hand, by direct knowledge and experience, for millennia, both inside and outside themselves, is what we might call the Old Ways. In these six essays, Black Mountain poet-alumnus, Gary Snyder explores the old ways via poetry, myth, and sense of place. “Entering such paths, we begin to learn a little of the Old Ways, which are outside of history, and forever new”.
City Lights Books 96 pp. $6
ANARCHY COMIX No. 1 & No. 4
In these hilarious spoofs of modern life by a talented assembly of international cartoonists, Authority enters the laughing-gas chamber of anarchist humor.
Last Gasp $2.50
POLL TAX REBELLION by Danny Burns
This is the inside story of the biggest mass movement in British history, one which at its peak involved over 17 million people. Using the voices of those involved, it describes the everyday organization of the local Anti-Poll Tax Unions. It chronicles in detail the demonstrations and riots of March 1990, culminating in the massive battle of Trafalgar Square. It shows how the courts were blocked, the bailiffs resisted and the Poll Tax, in its original form, destroyed. The final chapter draws on this experience to present a radically new vision of change from below.
AK Press 202 pp. $8 (see review FE Autumn 1992)
LIFE OF AN ANARCHIST: The Alexander Berkman Reader edited by Gene Fellner
4 Walls, 8 Windows Pub. 354 pp. $17 (See review in this issue)
THE HAYMARKET TRAGEDY by Paul Avrich
In this moving appraisal of the infamous Haymarket bombing and the trial that followed it, Avrich shows how eight Anarchists who were blamed for the bombing at a workers meeting near Chicago’s Haymarket Square became the focus of a variety of passionately waged struggles.
Princeton U. Press 535 pp. $13.50
AN AMERICAN ANARCHIST: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre by Paul Avrich
Avrich’s book on Voltairine de Cleyre (1866- 1912) is the first full-length biography of a woman whose vision of a decentralized libertarian society, based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, has left a legacy to inspire new generations of young anarchists. The author is concerned with writing a biography that understands anarchists as human beings and to clear away the misconceptions that usually associate anarchism with terrorism, destruction, and chaos.
Princeton U. Press 265 pp. $14.50
SABOTAGE IN THE AMERICAN WORKPLACE: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief & Revenge Edited by Martin Sprouse
Safe-guarded by anonymity, contributors talk candidly about using Sabotage as a means of surviving work. People as diverse as bank tellers, machinists, paramedics, flight attendants, and paper boys describe how they creatively strike back at monotony, low pay, bad company ethics, poor working conditions, and harassment.
Pressure Drop Press 175 pp. $12
GOD AND THE STATE by Michael Bakunin
A classic text that has been a basic anarchist and radical document for generations. It is one of the clearest statements that religion is an obstruction to human freedom. A manifesto of Atheism.
Dover Publications 89 pp. $12
MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST by Peter Kropotkin
Kropotkin’s best known work and one of the great works of revolutionary literature. in it he brings alive the ferment of ideas and movements in the Europe of the late 19th century. If one wishes to know what it was like to be a revolutionary when it meant police repression, imprisonment or death, here is the book that tells it first-hand.
Dover Publications 551 pp. $12
Books by Alexander Berkman
PRISON MEMOIRS OF AN ANARCHIST by Alexander Berkman
Berkman’s fourteen years in prism- turned him into a man of exceptional maturity and wisdom and his memoirs are the record of the reformation of a personality in a way quite the opposite to that intended by the prison system. However the book is considerably more than that. It is by far the most honest story of prison life written up to its time.
—Kenneth Rexroth
Frontier Press 538 pp. $8
THE RUSSIAN TRAGEDY by Alexander Berkman
What went wrong in Russia? How did the successful attempt to overthrow the old dictatorship of the Tsarist system only lead to the new dictatorship of the Communists?
Phoenix Press 91 pp. $5
WHAT IS COMMUNIST ANARCHISM? by Alexander Berkman
A key text in the development of anarchist ideas first published in 1929. Contains gripping accounts of the Haymarket Martyrs, the case of Mooney and Billings, of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the tragedy of the Communist destruction of the Russian Revolution(to which Berkman was an eyewitness), and more.
Phoenix Press 177 pp. $7.50
ABCs OF ANARCHISM by Alexander Berkman
First published in 1929, Berkman’s work still remains one of the best introductions to the ideas of anarchism. Berkman was no mere theoretician, but a militant activist for much of his life. Berkman was a lifelong companion of Emma Goldman and served years in prison for political offenses. The book poses and then answers questions such as “Is Anarchy Possible?” and “Is Anarchism Violence?”
Freedom Press 86 pp. $5