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Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond Paperback – November 16, 2005

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Mark Ames (Author)
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Mark Ames (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars 35 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 284 pages
  • Publisher: Soft Skull Press (November 16, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1932360824
  • ISBN-13: 978-1932360820
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.6 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,058,496 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsGoing Postal is required reading
By Jay Tell on December 4, 2005
Format: Paperback
If you weren't in one of the popular cliques in high school (i.e. 90 percent of us), if you've ever worked in a flourescent-lit nest of cubicles for idiot overseers (i.e. a typical office environment) you will read 'Going Postal' and nod, and read and nod, and as you read further, you will get more and more fired up.

But fired up enough to do something, to actually go postal? Well, according to Ames, that depends on your mental health. 'Normal' folks just smile and suck it up, letting it build up and eat out their insides, and in this way make it through yet another soul-crushing day. If you're one of the normal folks, then this book is for you. If you're thinking of going postal, well... this book might just push you over the edge. You'd better stick to your John Grishams and Suze Ormans.

Ames is able to write about something so basic to our existence (the school and office ARE the settings of our lives, he rightly points out) because he has earned perspective: He's a SoCal native (not coincidentally, the coastal 'paradise' where many US rage murders are concentrated) who has worked for years as a journalist in Russia. This perspective helped him notice things so elementary and important that we Americans take them for granted, and hence, ignore their significance. Even two decades and dozens of rage murders haven't shaken us out of our zombie-like stupor. It takes somebody like Ames -- one of us, but then, not really one of us -- to pull back the curtain and reveal how cruel, petty, and spiritually debilitating our lives in America are.

And it doesn't have to be this way. This state of affairs was not inevitable.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsInsightful and saddening...
By Ed Weinberg on October 27, 2005
Format: Paperback
Mr Ames, of the ex-pat alternative paper The Exile in Moscow, has been working on this strong book for years, and now that it's here, I don't know who'll want to read it. It's devastating. I felt a little dirty bringing my copy into work. My boss asked me what I was reading, I told him about it, and then said, "You'd better watch out," because I'm something of a loose cannon. He told me to shut up, and that was that.

Anyway, the book. What Mr Ames lacks in writing ability (not much, but his language is thick with judgmental adjectives that make the reading more arduous- maybe this was his intention?) he makes up for in original thought, and this book is a complex and original work. Revolutionary would not be too strong a word. He compares post office, workplace and school shootings to slave uprisings, and goes far into his comparisons by quoting the language surrounding both rebellions. Where Columbine's murderers were motivated by base evil and video games, Nat Turner's slave army seemed to be motivated by base evil and the ingratitude and treachery of the negroes, in the media accounts of the time. Ames doesn't think these accounts cover for the hostile environments that precipitated the attacks, rather he believes that the problem was that slavery was ingrained in the value systems of Nat Turner's time, so much so that they couldn't see anything anyone would find objectional about it, in much the same way that we can't admit now that our culture has something to do with the recent epidemic of rage massacres. Can you believe?- 45 school shootings in the 2003-04 academic year alone.

It's an unwieldy topic, but Ames does a terrific job with it. One thing I would have liked to see would be a handling of the original march to unionization. I guess that at the time, the government didn't support companies killing their employees with low wages and unsafe conditions quite so much. Now, they do that stuff legally.
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5.0 out of 5 starsOriginal and provocative analysis
By Karen Franklin on February 14, 2008
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
When you crack open a book entitled "Going Postal," you don't expect to start reading about the antebellum South. But Ames starts by transporting us back in time in service of his provocative theme - that today's rage murders in workplaces and schools are contemporary forms of slave rebellion, indeed the only possible form of rebellion in a society as decollectivized and militarized as the modern corporate United States.

In this highly original and intriguing analysis, Ames ridicules "copycat" pundits who myopically search everywhere but right in front of their faces to explain the wave of workplace and schoolyard shootings that has swept through the United States over the last couple of decades. Hollywood movies, video games, the National Rifle Association, mental illness, bad parenting - the list of potential culprits is endless. But never the "toxic culture" of the institutions that breed these doomed revolts.

Whereas initial news accounts often vilify shooters as almost cartoon cutouts - mentally imbalanced, trench-coated racists or kooks - Ames offers in-depth portrayals, so we come to know them as ordinary human beings oppressed and stressed to the breaking point by a ruthless corporate or school environment. Attempts to profile individual offenders fall flat, Ames argues, because the offenders are potentially anyone. As evidence, he catalogs the widespread sympathy for many of the shooters among their former coworkers and classmates. One would never see such sympathy among victims of serial sex murderers, he points out.

Instead of profiling the individual rebels, Ames profiles the institutions.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

lndispensable

Published 3 months ago by Carmen Fernandez
4.0 out of 5 starsA Nation Going Berserk

"Going Postal" by Mark Ames is a chilling work with an original and powerful thesis: most rage-murders in the US are failed revolts from "sane" people who finally... Read more

Published 6 months ago by Jeff T
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

If you've ever worked a temp job, you'll recognize yourself in here.

Published 7 months ago by Trevor Kroger
1.0 out of 5 starsLeftist Garbage

I started reading this book because I am intrigued by abnormal violent individuals and the root causes of their actions. Read more

Published on June 22, 2014 by Alex Underwood
5.0 out of 5 starsAstounding, original work

Mark Ames is one of those writers who comes up with so many original ideas and observations that the stupid stuff he frequently says--whining about racism, inventing Koch... Read more

Published on July 31, 2013 by Matt W.
5.0 out of 5 starsMark Ames is one of the best American writers

I highly recommend Mark Ames work, here, in The Exiled, and at NSFWcorp. Any time there is a rampage shooting, Mark Ames is the person to interview, his insights based on... Read more

Published on May 26, 2013 by DG
1.0 out of 5 starsAnother misguided bunch of hablooyee

This guy mixes up the public sector and the private sector.... Completely destroys his argument. He is even inconsistent with his years and his evidence.

Published on April 14, 2013 by Ohiopherks
5.0 out of 5 starsfood for thought

puts a whole new spin on the misleading term 'going postal'. eye-opening accounts of the what and whys of America's troubling shootings.

Published on March 21, 2013 by Yogijo
4.0 out of 5 starsFinally, a Look at the Disease, not Just the Symptoms

Ames is on to something here as he describes the conditions that led to the rage killings that have become so common since the 1980's. Read more

Published on February 21, 2013 by sopor0qv
5.0 out of 5 starsImportant, well documented, and evocatively written

Mark Ames, who with Matt Taibbi at The eXile made an art form of colorfully written, in your face journalism that chronicled the plutocratic plunder of Russia, chooses a very... Read more

Published on November 6, 2012 by S. Webber

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