Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties

Description

In this new edition of his sixties' memoirs, Tariq Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. It is a story that moves between London, Paris and Berlin, as well as Vietnam and Bolivia, encountering along the way Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Henry Kissinger and Mick Jagger. Ali captures the mood of those years with a novelist's lightness of touch as he tracks the growing significance of the nascent protest movement. This edition includes a new introduction, as well as the interview conducted by Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971.

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics, including, most recently, Bush in Babylon and The Clash of Fundamentalisms as well as five novels, and scripts for both stage and screen. He is much in demand as a public speaker and commentator on, among other topics, US involvement in the Middle East. He is an editor of New Left Review and lives in London.

'Tariq Ali has not lost the passion and vim which made him a symbol of the spirit of '68... has not seen fir to join forces with the terminally cynical, or set up a craven god that can be accused of failing... Ali has spent much of his life denouncing America as the arsenal of counter-revolution.' Christopher Hitchens Observer 'We need to remember the Sixties, and Tariq Ali's book is a valuable ands well presented evidence of the time... as Ali points out the transition from revolutionary to arch-conservative is nothing new... we may frequently have been misguided, but nothing is sadder than a generation without a cause.' John Mortimer Sunday Times 'Had me rapt on the hearthrug, peering into the embers of memory... the memoir proposes that the overriding themes were the confrontation with US imperialism... the efforts of a generation to shake off the shackles of social-democracy and conduct a war on capitalism a l'outrance.' Alexander Cockburn Guardian