If this anarchists summer guide puts you in the mood for some beach reading that involves something edgier than adventure fantasy or romances, you've come to the right place. Below you'll find some books that either offer examples of real-life anarchy or fictional anarchists — or are so imbued with an anarchist spirit, you just might be tempted to become a menace to decent society.
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
The book that, whether the author meant to or not, inspired active environmental protest such as Greenpeace, Earth First and Julia Butterfly Hill's two-year stay in a redwood. Abbey was a great nature writer, a knowledgeable and respected environmentalist and, above all, a lover of the western desert terrain. His most famous novel is a true romp, centered around the activities of one George Washington Hayduke III, a Vietnam vet with a great love of the desert. He comes home, finds his beloved land threatened by industrial development and goes ballistic. He joins forces with three others — wilderness guide Seldom Seen Smith, feminist saboteur Bonnie Abbzug, and Doc Sarvis, an M.D. specializing in torching ugly billboards. Together, they go on a mission to destroy new bridges, power lines and roads that have been springing up across their treasured desert. They vow to protect the region's canyons, rivers and mesas and proceed to wage war on the big earthmoving machines, strip miners and builders of dams and roads, all while philosophizing about the glories of the natural world, making love, cracking jokes, avoiding danger (as much as you can avoid danger and still be a terrorist organization) and generally raising hell for the sake of the desert. If there's an anarchist classic for our time, this is it.
Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen
The bottom line is this: Native Floridian Carl Hiaasen hates greedy developers — the ones who trash the environment in order to put up cheesy condos, or one more strip mall, or another friggin' theme park. Hiaasen's produced a body of fiction that takes on Florida's developers, shysters, schemers, and sleazy dreamers, not to mention clueless, nature-killing tourists, and rips them to shreds. He does it with some of the sharpest satirical strokes written in the last couple of decades. In Tourist Season, Hiaasen, an award-winning columnist for the Miami Herald, creates his own alter ego, Skip Wiley, a newspaper columnist who has had it up to here with the influx of Northerners to Florida and the resulting problems of overdevelopment, environmental rape and raw greed — not to mention really bad taste in clothes. Wiley the journalist "disappears" and reappears in a radical organization called the Nights of December, which is pledged to wreak havoc on those who are destroying Florida's former natural beauty. They start by taking a tourist, shoving a rubber gator down his throat and putting his dead body inside his luggage. When they say "Tourist Season," they mean it as in "open season on tourists." And it only gets weirder. This book, and most of Hiaasen's work, are filled with dark but hysterical humor of the first order and an anarchic feel that won't let go.
Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden
Mark Bowden is an award-winning reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer who writes in a no-nonsense style and with a knack for creating a gripping story out of chaos. In his latest book, he delves into a recent example of true anarchy — the state of the Colombian nation during the 15 months it took to track down and kill Pablo Escobar, the head of that country's Medellin drug cartel. When Escobar escaped from house arrest in a lavish mansion, the government decided to kill him rather than have him re-arrested and retried. Acclaimed journalist Mark Bowden reveals documented proof, including interviews with the principal characters, that U.S. military and intelligence operatives — members of the CIA, FBI, DEA and the Army's counterterrorism Delta Force unit — covertly led the mission to find and kill the world's most dangerous outlaw. In the last months of the search, they allied with Colombian criminal elements opposed to Escobar, and launched an all-out war that resulted in nearly daily bombings, thousands of deaths and a government that teetered on the verge of irrelevance and collapse. This is fast-moving, almost breathless writing, of which Bowden is a master.
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
If you're looking for literary anarchy, look no further than the great, the hilarious, the scary William S. Burroughs. One of the founding members of the Beats, Burroughs described language itself as a "word virus" designed to keep humanity under control. He dedicated himself to finding "cures" for this authoritarian, freedom-destroying word virus and gave us the "cut-up" technique of writing that resulted in dazzling but nearly incomprehensible works like Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. Before them, though, was Naked Lunch, one of the seminal works of post-war literature. (Once, after hearing a critic describe the book that way, Burroughs joked that he didn't realize he "was in such a sticky situation.")
Naked Lunch is more or less the tale of a heroin addict's wild descent into a kind of hell, moving from New York to Tangier and then to the Interzone, where he finds a nightmarish urban wasteland where evil authoritarian forces contend for control of humanity. Pepper the whole thing with humorously distributed obscenities and slang, and a generous dose of 30s-dullard-America bashing, and you've got a general idea. If you think it sounds like a drug-induced paranoid dream, well, you're close. At the time, Burroughs was a queer junkie who was intimately familiar with the full extent of what was then the most underground of undergrounds. But this was drugs mixed with talent and vision: Naked Lunch is a swirling mix of politics, allegory, nonlinear narration, science-fiction and wild humor, although actually, humor's hardly the word for Burroughs' explosive use of slapstick, smart-ass asides and biting satire.
Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and friends came to visit, and rescued Burroughs' manuscript from the crud-encrusted floor. The book was published in Paris in 1959 and in the United States in 1962. The obscenity trial that resulted was the landmark case that essentially ended literary censorship in America.
Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner
An author who spent a long career writing and thinking about the West, Stegner realized that a lot of that region's appeal was the sense of unfettered freedom it engendered in new arrivals, especially in the pre-interstate days. This great novel about the legendary union organizer/singer/martyr Joe Hill looks straight into the anarchic face of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies). The Wobblies were most successful at organizing in Western mining country. They were, by today's standards, inconceivably idealistic and fervent about unionism — and ready to back it up with their fists, clubs, you name it. Maybe it was because they were up against tyrannical, heartless and brutal companies that make today's businessmen look like Mother Teresa. Severe beatings and even murders of IWW organizers were common, as were revenge and rioting by the union boys.
Stegner tries to peel away the layers of mythology that have accumulated around Joe Hill. A grim-faced Swedish sailor, a passionate Wobbly, a possible murderer, a definite victim of a company-led conspiracy with law enforcement and, finally, a willing martyr for the cause — all these dimensions of Hill's life and death are explored in an effort to come to terms with the "real" Joe Hill. One of the best things about Joe Hill is the lively portrait Stegner delivers of an exciting, wide-open and nearly forgotten era in America's violent past.
Two-Bear Mambo by Joe R. Lansdale
If you're not familiar with Joe R. Lansdale, well, maybe that's a good thing; the guy can give you nightmares. At the same time, though, he's one of the funniest writers in America; it's the way he merges the two that's amazing. Two-Bear Mambo is the third in his Hap Collins-Leonard Pine amateur detective series, which takes place in Lansdale's native East Texas. Collins is a part-time field hand and Pine is his black, gay partner — a Vietnam vet with a smart mouth, fists of iron and an eye for cute male booty.
Here, the duo go to Grovetown, Texas, a Klan stronghold, to look for a gorgeous-but-missing black woman who was Hap's former lover and Leonard's lawyer. The horror and humor are flow freely in Grovetown, which is a Disneyworld Haunted House version of a small redneck town. A flood of biblical proportions and a horrific climactic scene wrench both the town — and the reader's head — into a state of apocalyptic anarchy. All the Hap and Leonard books are anarchic in the extreme — at least in the sense of complete disregard for normal boundaries of behavior and political correctness. Lansdale obviously isn't everybody's cup of tea, but his talent for provoking roll-on-the-floor laughter and gut-wrenching terror in the same paragraph is unlike anything else I've read.
Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
This book is a wild ride by a wildly underrated (or at least underappreciated) writer. Reed takes apart Western Civilization and puts it back together in a bitingly satiric narrative collage that upends views of black-white relations throughout history, as well as any accepted notions of conventional storytelling. More than anything, the book is completely subversive and utterly hilarious.
This one's so anarchic, it's hard to tell exactly what it's about. Certain characters do keep reappearing, like Back-to-Africa/Black Pride leader Marcus Garvey, but it's one long running commentary that mixes historical figures and fictional characters who deliver soundbites and arguments about everything from ragtime to Greek philosophy to movies to explosives. More than anything, it's about race, about how it has thoroughly warped not just American but all of Western culture — and how in the end racial confusion, ironically, is one of the only unchanging pillars of society we have left to lean on.
The Coming Anarchy:
Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert Kaplan
In these nine essays on international affairs, Kaplan blends literature, historical analysis, acute observation and storytelling. His main point is that the world is not turning out to be, nor will it ever turn out to be, the way post-Cold War optimists proclaimed it would. In other words, liberal democracy is not the organizing principle of the new world (dis)order. Kaplan, who won awards galore for Balkan Ghosts, in which he predicted the last few years' East European mess, warns of a "world divided between societies like ours, producing goods and services that the rest of the world wants, and those mired in various forms of chaos."
Kaplan paints a disturbing portrait of a world in which nation-states are giving way to warring nationalities and where ever-growing populations compete for dwindling resources. Kaplan says that rather than the jeans-wearing, Coke-swilling international consumer paradise envisioned by our political and corporate leaders, we're in for a future full of ethnic and religious conflict and wars over natural resources. A quick look at East Europe, West Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia can't help but make you feel he could be right. The irony, says Kaplan, was that the Cold War, despite all its tensions and dangers, provided a kind of stability in even the shakiest of nations. Now that's gone, and here we are, perhaps having to face up to Kaplan's uncomfortable truths.
Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed
More than a decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it's hard to grasp what a huge electric charge coursed through the world after Russia's October Revolution of 1917. The hard truth that Soviet communism turned into the last century's greatest example of "Sounds great — Won't work" doesn't change the fact that, even while worldwide business interests cringed, millions everywhere felt a new birth of optimism about the future — and celebrated the fact that everyday people had been able to organize and overthrow one of the world's seemingly immutable governments.
John Reed, an American journalist, was on assignment in Russia for The Masses, the leading American radical/avant-garde magazine. He spent his time there talking to people, walking the streets, collecting newspapers and handbills, and observing an old order coming to an end in a burst of what he called "anarchic goodwill." His first-hand account of the October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, vibrates with a raucous immediacy, reading like a novel as Reed describes arguments, meetings and conversations, recounts political schemes and maneuvers, and conveys a crackling electricity that must have infused the very air one breathed at that time and place.
Even though Reed was openly sympathetic to the revolution, and even though his prose veers at times to florid exuberance, this isn't just a piece of commie propaganda, but a well-explained, serious work of history. This is impassioned writing about an impassioned time. And yes, Reed's story was the basis of the movie Reds with Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton.
A Distant Mirror:
The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman
One of the late historian Barbara Tuchman's most fascinating books, A Distant Mirror reveals in harrowing detail the 1300s, a "tortured century" with many parallels to our own time. Tuchman shows that the upheaval, violence and spiritual dislocation that marked the 20th century were at work with equal energy 700 years ago in Europe, a time when the world seemed on the verge of tumbling into — yes, you guessed it — anarchy.
People in the 14th century suffered myriad natural and man-made disasters, including the brutal Hundred Years' War, the Crusades, insurrections galore, lawlessness and banditry, the massacres of Jewish people, the Schism of The Church, and the Black Death, which killed nearly half the population between India and Iceland.
Tuchman humanizes the book by letting the reader see the century through the eyes of one person, a nobleman named Enguerrand de Coucy (1340-97), a "whole man in a fractured time." Particularly chilling is her analysis of 14th century psychology as the book follows Enguerrand from battle to battle, observing how disasters, wars and plagues forced people apart in a way that dulled their emotional responses almost to the point of atrophy. Anyone who's seen the dead look in the eyes of returning soldiers, or even the dulled, blank gazes of teen killers on the TV news, can see a parallel in our own world.
This article appears in May 17-24, 2001.