Vineland echoes, Pynchon mention in new book review

[pynchonoid]

[...]The red-diaper baby of a probable FBI informant
and a mother who helped organize a Broadway
press-agents union, John Ross has survived police
nightsticks, amphetamine addiction and an abortive
stint as a human shield in Baghdad. Now he's written a
ragged but downright glorious memoir, which doubles as
a kind of "Spoon River Anthology" for the American
left.

Like Edgar Lee Masters' half-forgotten classic,
"Murdered by Capitalism" is, among much else, an
oratorio for tombstones. The book starts out as a
riotous, fanciful duet in a Humboldt County boneyard
between Ross and the shade of Edward Schnaubelt, a
suspect in Chicago's Haymarket bombing of 1886.
Between them, they know a century and a half of
radical history. Eventually, it all builds to a
hell-for-leather chorus of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and
anarcho-syndicalists -- not to mention the bronzed
corpse of a brimstone- eating President McKinley.

All of which would have sufficed to sell out the
initial print run at City Lights (whose co-founder,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, has joined Thomas Pynchon in
ponying up an endorsement), but does little to prepare
more apolitical readers for the rabid majesty of Ross'
prose. [...]

...from:
A lefty's rollicking memoir Ross can't spell, but he
sure knows how to write 
David Kipen
Tuesday, June 8, 2004

review of
Murdered by Capitalism
A Memoir of 150 Years of Life and Death on the
American Left
By John Ross
NATION BOOKS; 353 PAGES; $15.95 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/06/08/DDG2C711D11.DTL



	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/