Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel - Hardcover

Jezer, Marty

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813518504 ISBN 13: 9780813518503

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1992

Synopsis

In this sympathetic history of a maligned decade, Marty Jezer, a fellow antiwar activist, details Abbie Hoffman's humor, manic energy, depressive spells, political skills, & above all, his incurable & still contagious optimism. He presents a thoughtful, solidly researched biography of the wildly creative & iconoclastic Yippie, portraying Hoffman as a fresh force in American political culture. Jezer surveys in detail the politics, philosophies, & struggles of the antiwar movement.

"... Abbie, more than any other radical, showed potheads how to demonstrate and radicals how to dance." -- Chicago Tribune

"... deeply sympathetic and scrupulously detached-a triumph of judicious empathy." -- MARTIN DUBERMAN, Distinguished Professor of History, Lehman/The Graduate School, C.U.N.Y.

"... details Hoffman's humor, manic energy, depressive spells, political skills, and above all, his Incurable and still contagious optimism." -- Entertainment Weekly

"Here's the Abbie I knew and loved! Marty Jezer has captured him in all his complexity, dedication, humor, and heart." -- ANITA HOFFMAN

About this title

About the Author

Marty Jezer (November 21, 1940 – June 11, 2005) was a well-known activist and author, active in the peace, environmental and civil rights movements. He was editor of WIN magazine (Workshop In Nonviolence), from 1962-68, and was a writer for Liberation News Service (LNS). He was active in the nuclear freeze movement, and the organic farming movement, helping found the Natural Organic Farmers' Association. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He authored several books including The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945-1960, Rachel Carson: Biologist and Author, andStuttering: A Life Bound Up In Words.

Reviews

This critical, comprehensive biography of the late radical Abbie Hoffman surveys in detail the politics, philosophies and struggles of the antiwar movement and, to a lesser extent, civil rights, feminism and environmentalism. Even though Jezer ( The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960 ) clearly respects Hoffman's ability to mobilize dissenters, he does not shirk from challenging Hoffman's attention-getting tactics, often perceived as clownish or macho. Jezer contends that the Jewish Hoffman's upbringing in conservative, largely non-Jewish, working-class Worcester, Mass., taught him to accept people of varied backgrounds and contributed to his energetic support of civil rights. His youth also led him to adopt a "tough hood" stance that he never abandoned, and that did not allow him to fully practice nonviolence. Hoffman's formative education in radicalism at Brandeis and Berkeley, his support of antiwar political candidates and his founding of the politicized Yippie movement on Manhattan's Lower East Side are discussed. Anecdotal accounts of demonstrations are here in abundance; much attention is given to "guerrilla theater," police brutality and Hoffman's problems with the law on a cocaine-dealing charge. Little is made of his life outside the political arena, but the manic depression that led him to commit suicide in 1989, at age 53, is shown to have been an ever-present, worsening condition. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A thoughtful, solidly researched biography of the wildly creative and iconoclastic yippie, portraying Hoffman as a fresh force in American political culture--and as a man ultimately sabotaged by bipolar disorder (manic-depression), which drove him to extremes and probably led to his suicide. In 1988, Jezer (the children's book Rachel Carson, 1978) ran into Hoffman in an airport. A veteran activist and countercultural journalist who'd known the famed radical from the early hippie days on the Lower East Side until the violent days on the streets of Chicago in 1968, Jezer embraced Hoffman and listened with growing unease as the time-battered yippie ranted on and on about how great everything was going. Hoffman would be dead the next year. From this almost Dostoyevskian image of a radical out of balance, consumed by his own raging misplaced energy (in this case, the hypomanic phase of bipolar disorder), Jezer traces Hoffman's early influences. From the time he was a middle-class Jewish teenager in Worcester, Mass., Hoffman loved to play the rebel street-fighting man. It was the famous humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, his professor at Brandeis, however, who inspired Hoffman to conceive of political protest as a positive expression, a means of self- actualization. In the ``Yippie!'' movement, founded with Jerry Rubin, Hoffman sought to fuse the creativity and individualism of the counterculture with the righteous spirit of the antiwar movement. Here, Hoffman appears as his own best creation--half Lenny Bruce, half political shaman, throwing cash off the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange, trying to levitate the Pentagon, proclaiming himself a member of the ``Woodstock Nation,'' not a place but a beautiful, free state of mind. Hoffman--and a whole doomed, inspired era--emerges vividly in this cleareyed, richly detailed work. (Photographs--24 pages b&w- -not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Do not be misled by the fact that this book was published by a university press. Jezer's biography offers a fascinating and eminently readable study of one of the most controversial and emblematic symbols of the 1960s. Jezer, himself a veteran of pacifist movements against the Vietnam War, traces Hoffman's evolution from Brandeis beatnik to Yippie leader and spokesperson for the Woodstock nation. As Jezer shows, Hoffman remained active around environmental and social justice issues during the narcissistic 1970s and the Reaganite 1980s. This warts-and-all portrait of a unique rabble-rouser is surprisingly witty, absorbing, and even significant. Highly recommended for all collections.
- Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813518504
• ISBN 13: 9780813518503
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 325