William T. Vollmann's new condensed version of Rising Up and Rising Down briefly mentions Alexander Berkman's autobiography Memoirs of an Anarchist.
"In 1892, the anarchist Alexander Berkman goes to Pittsburgh in hopes of avenging by assasination the ruling class's murders of the Homestead strikers."
Vollmann has a very brief quote of Berkman's description of the industrial landscape, but it's still enough to give you an idea of Berkman's writing:
"The sight fills me with hatred of the perverse social justice that turns the
needs of mankind into an Inferno of brutalizing toil."
As you may be able to glean from our book cover, Berkman has to undergo more than a little brutalizing toil of his own, once incarcerated.
Recent Comments