Welcome to Installment No. 33 of Books (and more) by Friends.

Red Sky: Recollections of the International Hotel is a comprehensive summary of the longest housing battle in San Francisco history and the 1977 eviction and destruction of the Manilatown Kearny Street Filipino community. The volume is by Emil De Guzman, president of the International Hotel Tenants Association at the time of the eviction.

Gerald Horne’s newest book is Armed Struggle? Panthers and Communists; Black Nationalists and Liberals in Southern California through the Sixties and Seventies. The volume draws critical distinctions between armed propaganda, armed self-defense – and armed struggle – all of which is placed in a global context of anti-war activism, the Cold War, and African liberation.

Frank Emspak, life-long labor leader and anti-war activist, died last month at age 80. Besides a legacy of bottom-up organizing and labor journalism, Frank has left us a memoir rich in insight, Troublemaker: Saying No to Power.  In his review of the volume, radical historian Paul Buhle wrote that the book: “provokes new questions about how a handful of unique members of the 1960s political generation found their way, did their work, and now understand their lives.”

Carlos Muñoz, Jr. also has written a memoir recounting his remarkable journey – Victory Is in the Struggle: From Barrio Boy to Revolutionary & Scholar.  “An  intimate look at the life of a veteran of the Chicano Movement, a pioneering Ethnic Studies scholar, and a true organic intellectual”; “gripping, emotional, and historically rich.”

And check out Life on the Left: James Williams and the Quest for Justice, written by Michael Honey and James Williams with the assistance of Casey Wagner. The volume spans Jim’s high school days in the 1950s and the civil rights campaigns, through his key roles in the SDS and Southern Student Organizing Committee antiwar battles, and then his work in the labor movement as an organizer and editor.

Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché offer us How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment. “Drawing on extensive interviews with abolitionist crews all over North America, the authors provide a collective reconstruction of what the grassroots movement to abolish prisons actually is.”

Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education, by Tom Roderick, is not a curriculum. Rather, it offers an inspiring vision of how to inform and guide educators in stepping back, taking a clear look at our predicament, and rethinking how best to serve students and the planet.

How about a film that traces the roots of American Country music, reclaiming it as the creative musical expression of working people of all colors? That’s what you’ll get with Open Country from filmmakers Glenda Drew and Jesse Drew. Open Country is screening exclusively for live audiences as a fund-raising and community connecting event for local organizations and music venues; for full information, click here.  

The previous installment of ‘Books by Friends” flagged a mixtape for Palestine – Rise Up BDS, Mixtape No. 2. Here’s another in that genre, Mixtape for Palestine: A Funddraiser for the Middle East Children’s Alliance.  Ot features among many numbers Nora Roman and the Border Busters’ “Song for Palestine.”

The book Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, by Stephanie Luce and Deepak Bhargava, was also featured in last fall’s “Books by Friends.” The authors have followed up with a biweekly podcast – check it out here. And for an excellent review of a previously flagged work of photojournalism documenting “lives lived on hard streets” – Division Street, by Robert Gumpert – look here.

On the poetry front, see Mariana McDonald’s contributions to the Alien Buddha Press Poetry Series Ceasefire Now? Chapter 5,  including “Four Questions on a Genocide.”  Ernie Brill’s latest collection, Journeys of Voices and Choices, includes “unapologetic work poems, tender love poems, even some carefully crafted sonnets, and a trove of Black Lives Matter hybrid haikus.”

From Jon Knowles comes MarxPsi, a sourcebook Marxist dialectics, materialism, consciousness and remote viewing. One focus of the volume is to revisit the role of Marxist dialectics in making revolution in the past, and the possible applicability of dialectics in achieving the major social change we desperately need now. See also McCarthyism in the Suburbs: Quakers, Communists and the Children’s Librarian, a book about Jon’s Mom’s case during that earlier period of political repression.   

Finally, the third edition of Janja Lalich’s book, Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships, explains the seductive draw that leads people into such situations, provides guidelines for assessing what happened, and hands-on tools for getting back on track.