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Up Against the Wall Motherf**er: A Memoir of the '60s, with Notes for Next Time
 
 
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Up Against the Wall Motherf**er: A Memoir of the '60s, with Notes for Next Time [Paperback]

Osha Neumann (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Book Description

November 4, 2008
They called themselves the Motherfuckers; others called them a "street gang with an analysis." Osha Neumann's thoughtful, funny, and honest account of his part in ’60s counterculture is also an unflinching look at what all that rebellion of the past means today. The fast moving story follows the establishment of the Motherfuckers, who influenced the Yippies and members of SDS; makes vivid the art, music, and politics of the era; and reveals the colorful, often deeply strange, personalities that gave the movement its momentum. Abbie Hoffman said the Motherfuckers were "the middle-class nightmare . . . an antimedia media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed." In the few years of its existence the group forced its way into the Pentagon during a war protest, helped occupy one of the buildings in the Columbia University takeover, and cut the fences at Woodstock to allow thousands in for free, among many other feats of radical derring-do.
Progressing from a fractured family of intellectuals to rebellion in the streets of New York and on to communes in California, Newmann shows us a view of a life led in rebellion, anger, and eventually a tentative peace.

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Customers buy this book with Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: The Incomplete Works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group $10.63

Up Against the Wall Motherf**er: A Memoir of the '60s, with Notes for Next Time + Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: The Incomplete Works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group


Editorial Reviews

About the Author

After a childhood spent in middle-class comfort in the Bronx, OSHA NEUMANN attended Swarthmore and Yale. He became deeply involved with student activism and eventually moved back to New York, where he helped to found the anarchist street gang, the Motherfuckers. Neumann is now a lawyer in Berkeley, California.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 224 pages
  • Publisher: Seven Stories Press; Seven Stories Press 1st Ed edition (November 4, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1583228497
  • ISBN-13: 978-1583228494
  • Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.6 x 8.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,131,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author


I was born in 1939, the year the Second World War broke out in Europe. My parents were Jewish intellectuals who fled Germany to escape the Nazis. I listened to their dinner table conversation and concluded, while still a child, that which side I was on in the great battle between fascism and anti-fascism gave ultimate meaning to my life. I thought that as a Jew I had no choice but to be an anti-fascist. I now no longer connect the duty to be antifascist to being Jewish. The way Israel treats the Palestinians has shown me that Jews, like all people, are capable of acting like fascists. I think of the battle between fascists and anti-fascists as one form of the eternal life-and-death struggle between reason and unreason, tenderness and brutality. However, I also believe that the sides in that struggle tend to get mixed up. Nothing we do is free from contradiction. In the Sixties I became a founding member of an anarchist street gang known as The Motherf--ers, whose very name embodies those contradictions. I'm now a painter, a sculptor and a lawyer. I supervise a free legal clinic for poor people who can't get help anywhere else. In the Sixties we had a movement without a crisis of capitalism. Now we have a crisis of capitalism without a movement. The same System that causes suffering for the poor threatens the natural world. The poor and the polar bears -- their fate intertwined. I wonder who will survive and how those who do will live.

What a time to be reaching the butt end of my days.

What I'm writing:

I've completed the manuscript of a book about art with the title: "Is Art Dead or Dying or Just Going through its Usual Changes?: Reflections on Art and its Obstacles." I'm looking for a publisher.

I'm working on a long article about a mood of despair that many people, including myself, feel about our apparent inability to prevent catastrophic climate change. We're told that global warming threatens life on this planet as we've known it; we're told we may be past the "tipping point," and still we have to find a way to continue the eternal struggle for the greatest good possible for the greatest number of people. I'm writing about how to do that.


Osha Neumann

 

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An Eloquent and Insightful Memoir of the 60s, February 15, 2009
This review is from: Up Against the Wall Motherf**er: A Memoir of the '60s, with Notes for Next Time (Paperback)
Up Against the Wall Motherf**ker: A Memoir of the Sixties with Notes for Next Time

Osha Neumann is a prominent civil rights attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area. His book is a fantastic memoir of the intersection between 60s hippie culture and 60s radical culture, as seen from the vantage of an exceptionally perceptive and erudite attorney who has both achieved great 'straight' success AND stayed true to his roots.

Out of the dozens and dozens of books I have seen in my research for an upcoming documentary on Osha's friend, Alan Steinbach, MD (that deals, at least peripherally, with the legacy of the 60s) - this is by far the best!
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars honest, funny, and poetic, January 18, 2009
This review is from: Up Against the Wall Motherf**er: A Memoir of the '60s, with Notes for Next Time (Paperback)
I read the book in about a week over the winter break. There is much humor in it and there were times I put the book down to laugh. Much of the book feels uncensored and the author's reckoning with himself comes through again and again. The writing is beautiful - there's a Bob Dylan like quality to it, but even more raw and more political. This is a must read for anyone who lives a life driven by the desire to do good and to fight the good fight. It's medicine.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Best of Both Worlds, December 5, 2008
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Rachel (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Up Against the Wall Motherf**er: A Memoir of the '60s, with Notes for Next Time (Paperback)
This book is both a juicy lyrical rendition of a passionate time and place and also, and even more rare, a thoughtful look back at what that time and place can teach us about the present.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
moral callus, absolutist reason, against the wall mother
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Lower East Side, Puerto Rican, Bill Graham, Marks Place, United States, Black Bear, Angry Arts, New Mexico, Columbia University, New York, Gem's Spa, Greenwich Village, Cardinal Spellman, Tactical Patrol Force, National Forest, Alfonso Motherfucker, Black Panthers, Elvis Presley, Sproul Hall, Patrick's Cathedral, South Africa, Tompkins Square Park, Grayson Kirk, Mark Motherfucker, Lincoln Center
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