Contents
1. Young Bolshevik
2. Trotskyist Labor Organizer
3. Rethinker
4. Eco-Decentralist
5. Eco-Anarchist
6. Counterculture Elder
7. Man of the Moment
8. Social Ecologist
9. Antinuclear Activist
10. Municipalist
11. Green Politico
12. Assembly Democrat
13. Historian
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Janet Biehl was Murray Bookchin's copyeditor for the last two decades of his professional life, and collaborated with him on both books and articles. She works as a freelance copyeditor for Viking Penguin, Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon, Crown, Doubleday, and many other publishing houses.
"In Biehl's account, Bookchin's life is a story of the personal
toll taken by fighting for these revolutionary ideas in a
non-revolutionary era." --London Review of Books
"Biehl has an insider's view of Bookchin as both his collaborator
and his lover, and she uses that insight to paint a detailed and
lively picture of this important figure." -- Publishers Weekly
"Biehl's biography--for illuminating the emergence and contexts of
these ideas--may very well be the best introduction we have to
social ecology today. ... Janet Biehl has done a remarkable job
bringing Bookchin "back to life" for new generations." --New
Compass
"Biehl has written a compelling and significant chapter in American
history." -- Booklist
The prescient Bookchin emerges in Janet Biehl's politics-heavy
biography as incisive, inventive and pragmatic -- a refreshing
contrast to today's environmental doom-mongers and techno-utopians
alike." --Nature
"The first ... biography of Bookchin, it is well-written,
exhaustively documented, and invites readers to traverse the full
arc of his life, from his earliest days in New York City to his
last in Burlington, Vermont." --Institute for Anarchist Studies
"Biehl's fluid prose makes Bookchin's traverse of the American
leftist landscape accessible to the uninitiated. ... The biography
is her expression of gratitude and homage, which, as Biehl
demonstrates in these pages, Bookchin truly deserves." --Seven
Days
"[A]n admirably thorough guide to both Bookchin's remarkable
intellectual evolution and to the concrete issues and debates that
informed it. It is also a well-written and highly accessible
introduction to Bookchin and his ideas that promises to help keep
his legacy alive for the next generation of political and
environmental activists. ... [Biehl's] engaging and useful book has
injected fresh life into Bookchin's vision for an ecological and
libertarian left by
demonstrating its relationship to vital questions and tactics and
strategy that continue to be debated by present-day activists."
--Environmental Politics
"Janet Biehl's meticulously researched biography splendidly
captures Bookchin's intellectual and personal journey from youthful
communist to mature anarchist. Bookchin influenced the thinking and
actions of a generation but today his writings and insights are
largely unknown. Biehl's terrific book will do much to overcome
this illiteracy and introduce a new generation to one of the key
intellectuals of our time." -- David Morris, Director, Public
Good
Initiative, Institute for Local Self-Reliance
"Murray Bookchin was irascible, human, brilliant, and above all
relevant to our own time. This valuable book brings his work to
life and takes us through his intellectual, activist and personal
struggles between the late 1930s and the end of the 20th Century.
An ecologist before the term was understood by most Americans and a
sophisticated anarchist who recognized the importance of clear (but
decentralized) organizational structure, Bookchin's story also
offers
a reminder of what it takes to live a committed life in our own
time in history." -- Gar Alperovitz, Lionel R. Bauman Professor of
Political Economy at the University of Maryland, Co-Founder of
The
Democracy Collaborative
"Creative, charismatic, controversial and, many would add, more
often than not a bit cantankerous, Murray Bookchin was without
doubt one of the most significant anti-capitalist thinkers of the
last century. Here in Janet Biehl's intimate and meticulously
researched biography, we see his tumultuous life and times laid out
in such a way as to illuminate the cross-currents and confusions
that powered the rise of left-wing ecological movements over more
than half a
century. This biography deserves to be widely read for its
contemporary relevance." --David Harvey, CUNY Graduate Center
"Janet Biehl has written an insightful and compelling biography of
Bookchin, which not only illuminates the details of his fascinating
life, but which also captures a vivid sense of his times: the
Depression-haunted 1930s in New York where he grew up, the civil
rights struggle, the counterculture of the late 1960s, the peace
movements in the '70s and '80s, as well as the gradual emergence of
a global ecological consciousness of the past few decades."
--The
Vancouver Sun
"Provides a productive starting point for considering Bookchin's
legacy." --Jacobin
"Janet Biehl's biography of Bookchin is a very readable account of
his long involvement in various struggles of the US left..."
--LINKS: International Journal of Socialist Renewal
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