ISBN: 0-887392865
630 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Paperback Original
Price: $18.50
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Saying No To Power
William Mandel
Throughout his lifetime of lively, intelligent activism William Marx Mandel has worn many hats. He was born to Jewish parents of Polish and Ukrainian origin in Brooklyn, New York, in 1917-the year of the Russian revolution and the day before U.S. soldiers were registered for the World War I draft. By the age of ten, Bill was rattling a can in New York subways, collecting money to help feed striking miners and their families, as a member of the Young Pioneers, the Communist children's organization.
Mr. Mandel's accomplishments as a writer, educator, activist, and broadcaster are impressive without figuring in the years of blacklisting he incurred; but in light of the outrageous undemocratic nature of this period of our history and the decades-long cold-war-driven paranoia that followed, his successes are even more remarkable. A free thinker with seemingly boundless energy, William Mandel-at 82-is one of America's living treasures. Saying No To Power chronicles the life and times of one of the most engaged citizens this country has ever seen.
Review: "Saying No to Power beautifully articulates one of the deep myths of America. Mandel acted with courage, intelligence and flamboyance at a time when all three were precisely what the establishment was trying to eliminate. He may be an apostate, but he remains at the end of his book what he has been throughout his long and fruitful career: an optimist, a believer that, even amid the wrecks of the 20th century, something will come."
Jack Foley
San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
"Anyone concerned with the history and evolution of radical thought and action in the USA during the twentieth century must read William Mandel's trenchant study of what really went on in this country, the scenes behind the scenes, and the power plays of the powerful to keep themselves in power. Bravo!"
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poet Laureate of San Francisco
"You will never find another perspective on the 1960s quite like his. Mandel's wise and irresistably human memoir bears unique witness to the last seven decades of world history."
Matthew Lasar
Author, Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network
Bio: WILLIAM MANDEL is probably best known for his nearly four decades of honest and inspiring broadcasts on Berkeley's own KPFA, the first of the Pacifica Network radio stations. His books, Soviet But Not Russian, and Soviet Women are further testament to his humble, deeply multi-cultural brilliance.
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