A post received today from a program-heading librarian at UC Berkeley
reads in part:
"I met you at your reading at the Whole Note Series, and have been
avidly reading your book. I'm only sorry that I didn't have it to read
years ago.
"It's the most important book I've read in years. We've been
rallying for a union contract here at UC Library, and I had too little
knowledge of the details of the history of the labor movement that you
have lived through.
"I have been appalled since [I was] a small girl in Carson City,
Nevada, over the mental brutality of my generation toward the pioneer
folk tradition that was our heritage. It was a war that destroyed
community, calling it communism. Almost no one stood up to the day to
day cultural level of devastation. I did innocently, but the response
from people was vicious. I've had to spend my life finding an
understanding of what was going on....Pity I used to take personally the
extreme reactions to be ability to think with heart.
"I am truly grateful for your contributions, and extremely touched
and inspired by your autobiography. I began listening to you in the
early '60s on KPFA."
Two chapters of SAYING NO TO POWER may be read on my website
www.BillMandel.net
Because the list to which I am sending this includes prison-conditions
activists and academics, the latter particularly in the ex-Soviet and
Russian fields, may I point out that those two chapters include
descriptions of my hands-on activism with respect to prisoners in
Folsom, San Quentin, and Soledad prisons, and a variety of visits to the
Soviet Union (the chapters cover the 80s decade) more extensive and
deeper than that of any other Sovietologist I know. (My first book on
that subject was published in 1944, and I know that country at first
hand longer [1931-1998] than any other foreigner in recorded history.
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