FE Books

The FE Bookstore is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit. We share space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and may be reached at the same phone number: (313) 831–6800. Visitors are welcome, but our hours vary so please call before dropping in.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

1) List the title of the book, quantity wanted, and the price of each:

2) add 10% for mailing costs—not less than $1.05 U.S. or $1.60 foreign. (Minimum for 4^th class book rate postage):

3) total

4) write check or money order to: The Fifth Estate;

5) mail to: The Fifth Estate, 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, MI 48201.

BLACK MASK & UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERFUCKER by The Black Mask Group

“The New York Surrealist Group and the American Anarchist Group provided the basis for Black Mask, a radical artistic/political group who produced some ten issues of a powerful broadsheet and a number of politico-artistic demonstrations, like attempting to close down the Museum of Modern Art. Led by Ben Morea and the poet Dan Georgiakis, Black Mask finally transformed themselves into a totally dedicated underground revolutionary group, Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers, a number of whose members have been imprisoned for their activities.”

—Adrian Henri

Unpopular Books 144 pp. $10

THE FINAL EMPIRE: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION by William H. Kotke

If you believe the human race is racing off a cliff and taking the biosphere with it, if you are skeptical that incremental environmental reformism and the availability of green consumer products are going to halt this on rushing catastrophe, William Kotke’s The Final Empire will confirm your suspicions. Kotke is not afraid to deal with the entire context of an ecological collapse already in progress, even though his target is virtually the entire course of civilized human society over the past 10,000 years. Facing the final empire, the global corporate system now emerging, and it’s last-gasp exponential curve toward complete ecological exhaustion, Kotke does not faint in despair. Instead he strongly advocates planting seed communities, new human families based in Permaculture and healing; working together to recover the complex relations with nature and each other, lost in civilization’s millennia of subjugating indigenous peoples.

—Patrick Mazza editor, Rain Magazine

Arrowpoint Press 396 pp. $15

TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE by Hakim Bey

Published in 1991, this text is still in search of a community that would meaningfully debate as well as indulge its insights and vision. Ontological Anarchism, Poetic Terrorism, and the Temporary Autonomous Zone are the articles of belief for a new community which actualizes its will-to-power as disappearance. With verve and erudition Bey boldly insinuates to authoritarians and anti-authoritarians alike, that human liberation, beauty and adventure lie beyond the hypocrisies and banalities of our present. A work of relentless imagination and brilliant controversy.

Autonomedia 141 pp. $6

LOVE, SEX, AND POWER IN LATER LIFE: A Libertarian Perspective by Tony Gibson

“The revolution in sexual mores experienced in Western Europe over the past 30 years has largely bypassed the needs of older people, with the emancipated young often unable to accept that the old, especially parents and grandparents, also have a continuing need for sexual and emotional fulfillment. Tony Gibson, in a well documented account sets out to redress the balance. Whilst discussing the physical and psychological changes that occur during the process of growing old, he shows that these are perfectly compatible with a rich sexual and emotional life, only modestly modified to allow for the decline in physical prowess. After discussing the repressive social attitudes towards sexuality in later life fostered by the media, as well as conservative doctors and other health workers, he describes the contribution anarchist and libertarian writers have made towards the extension of the social revolution to older people and especially older women, who have suffered from aspects of sexism as well as ageism. Finally he describes how older people, men and women, can themselves ensure that they continue to live emotionally and physically satisfying lives as we move into a future in which the inevitable changes in population structure alter the balance of power between young and old.

Freedom Press. 104 pp. $8.50

IN THE ABSENCE OF THE SACRED by Jerry Mander

An important synthesis of voices opposing the Western technological machine with those defending indigenous cultures that lie in its path. from FE review

Sierra Club Books 446 pp. $14

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN by Fredy Perlman

This compendium of Fredy Perlman’s shorter writings, the most important of them collected here, chart an intellectual exploration from the student(and other) revolutions of 1968, in which Fredy took part in France and Italy, to the ecological concerns of today. His insights into industrialism, the nation-state and imperialism, racism and genocide, the psychology of power and dependency, are some of the most important in recent libertarian thought.

Phoenix Press 127 pp. $9

THE MACHINE AGAINST THE GARDEN by Fredy Perlman

Written a few months before his death, this is Fredy’s angry reply to an essay by literary academician Leo Marx. Fredy vehemently objects to Marx’s attempts to turn critics of American society into its celebrants—specifically in this case, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In Fredy’s introduction to these two essays, he insists that “Melville, Hawthorne and Thoreau were profound critics of the technological society.”

Aporia Press 28 pp. $4

ANARCHY OR CHAOS by George Woodcock

Written as World War Two raged around him. Woodcock’s writing is learned, yet filled with youthful enthusiasm. This volume is as fine a brief history of anarchism as is available today.

Lysander Spooner 124 pp. $9.50

LIFE OF AN ANARCHIST: The Alexander Berkman Reader edited by Gene Feltner

Drawing on the full range of Berkman’s works, Feltner has chosen the most significant and defining excerpts and arranged them in an anthology designed to introduce the reader to Berkman’s life and thought. Since, when not completely neglected, Berkman has been unfairly characterized- as a misguided zealot or pigeon-holed as Emma Goldman’s associate, the editor makes a conscious effort to piece together his selections in such a way as to define a multi-dimensional, evolving, human figure whose life and ideas become at the same time more intellectually significant and emotionally accessible. In this effort, Feltner succeeds admirably.

—G.L Doebler from FE Spring 1993

4 walls, 8 windows Pub. 354 pp. $17

THE OLD WAYS by Gary Snyder

The wisdom and skill of those who studied the universe first hand, by direct knowledge and experience, for millennia, both inside and outside themselves, is what we might call the Old Ways. In these six essays, Black Mountain poet-alumnus, Gary Snyder explores the old ways via poetry, myth and sense of place. “Entering such paths we begin to learn a little of the Old Ways, which are outside of history and forever new.”

City Lights Books 96 pp. $6

HAVING LITTLE, BEING MUCH: A CHRONICLE OF FREDY PERLMAN’S FIFTY YEARS by Lorraine Perlman

A remembrance of a friend, and the times and community in which he lived. “Lorraine’s direct and unadorned style lets Fredy’s life speak for itself; one cannot help but see it as exemplary.”—FE Review

Black and Red 155 pp. $3.50

WAR AFTER WAR: CITY LIGHTS REVIEW 5 edited by Nancy Peters

Featuring contributions from Allen Ginsburg, Jerry Mander, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Noam Chomsky, and others, War After War is a Post-Desert Storm examination of the Gulf War atrocity “not as an isolated exploit but as one facet of an interrelated whole, including the culture of the Middle East, the course of colonialism, Zionism and the historic Palestine, and the plunder of the Third World; as well as its repercussions on the home front and the conflicts born in the abyss of failed social policies. The wars against the sick, the poor, the old, the young, the wars against democracy, against the arts, and above all the relentless war against the planet itself. —from introduction

City Lights Review 273 pp. $12

AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGY: TECHNICS OUT-OF-CONTROL AS A THEME IN POLITICAL THOUGHT by Langdon Winner

Readers interested in technology, politics and social change will find Autonomous Technology a useful guide and a thoughtful inquiry into the relationship between technology and society. In it Winner outlines the paradoxes of technological development, the image of alienation and liberation evoked by machines, and he assesses the historical conditions underlying the exponential growth of technology.

M.I.T Press 386 pp. $11

FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION by Jerry Mander

Television doesn’t just have “bad” content, but changes how we perceive the world. Experience is no longer direct, but mediated by T.V. through centralized and unified images. The result is a loss of the sensuous world and a passive, easily manipulated population.

Quill 371 pp. $9

THE LAST DAYS OF CHRIST THE VAMPIRE by J.G. Eccarius

One of the most blasphemous books we have seen since the classics of sacrilege. The book jacket states: “His power grew over the ages. Enslaving minds and bodies through both religious hierarchies and direct telepathic control, Jesus Christ the Vampire promises people eternal life for the price of their minds.”

111 Publishing 180 pp. $6

LIVING MY LIFE by Emma Goldman

The turbulent autobiography of a woman at the center of the century’s major events. Although her life intersected with the famous figures of the era, it is the day-to-day struggles for anarchy which make this account come alive. This is the original two-volume edition first published in 1931

Dover 993 pp. (2 volumes) $18

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn

“...engaging, informative, passionate and extremely well-written...the best critical survey of American history available.”—FE Review

Harper and Row 614 pp. $12

THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE by Raoul Vaneigem

Written in 1963–65 and first published in France in 1967, Vaneigem’s book complements Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle which appeared in the same year. As the main programmatic statements of the Situationist International these two works played a larger part than any other publications in the gestation of the French ‘May events’ of 1968

Left Bank Books 216 pp. $11