Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps - Softcover

Grogan, Emmett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0862418933 ISBN 13: 9780862418939

Publisher: Rebel Inc., 1999

Synopsis

Ringolevi is the extraordinary story of Sixties urban guerrilla, Emmett Grogan. From the mean streets of Brooklyn to the Haight-Ashbury summer-of-love heyday, he and the Diggers were constantly organizing, protesting and partying, almost always at odds with the forces of the law. Blurring the lines between social history and romantic myth-making, Emmett Grogan takes the reader on an exhilarating adventure where the fight for liberty and personal freedom is always at the center of his crazy escapades. Ringolevio is manifesto, memoir and high adventure all rolled into one.

About this title

About the Author:

Emmett Grogan (c.1943—1978) was born Eugene Grogan in Brooklyn, New York. Called a “Superman of the Underground” by The Times (London), he was the founder of the Diggers, a legendary anarchistic group in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s that supplied free food, housing, and medical aid to runaways. On April 6, 1978, the thirty-five-year-old Grogan was found dead on a subway car in New York City, possibly of a drug overdose. Besides his autobiography, Grogan was the author of Final Score, a fictional crime novel.

Peter Coyote is an actor, activist, novelist, songwriter, and Emmy-winning voice-over artist. After a short apprenticeship at the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, he joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, where he became a prominent member of the San Francisco counterculture community and a founding member of the Diggers. His memoir is entitled Sleeping Where I Fall.

Review:

"The best and only authentic book written on the sixties underground." -Dennis Hopper "Of all those activists, Hopper thought the most interesting was the late Emmett Grogan, who ran the Diggers, a group that gave away food and clothing. Hopper thinks that Grogan's romanticized autobiography, Ringolevio, is the best book dealing with the '60s. The title was a New York street game 'of life and death.' 'Grogan thought that anybody who ever played that game would learn their position in life, ' Hopper said. 'He was out of New York, studied film making with Antonioni. He was a jewel thief, a heroin addict and then came to San Francisco and started the Diggers. He had a lot of charisma.'" -"The San Francisco Chronicle" "Emmett Grogan was a wonderful storyteller, and "Ringolevio "is a great book." -Jerry Garcia "It wouldn't be surprising if Emmett Grogan-'60s underground hero, prime mover of the Digger movement in San Francisco-were to come back to life. To know Grogan-a wild phenomenon who made the world his stange and could strut more in a month than Olivier played in a lifetime-was to entertain such possibilities." -"The Boston Globe" "A kind of case study that reappraises the '60s unapologetically but honestly, noting the mistakes and excesses, but also acknowledging some of the things that came from it that we should be proud of. Most people are afraid to admit how much fun it was." -Peter Coyote Grogan was "the underground superstar of the counterculture, a young man whom everyone who was hip had heard of but whom no one could ever find...Wherever it was happening in the 1960's, Emmett Grogan was there." -"The New York Times" "This autobiography is at once anamazing example of romantic self-mythologizing and a broad history of the hippie movement of the late nineteen-sixties...Mr. Grogan writes so clearly that he almost convinces us that the whole story could be true." -"The New Yorker" "Grogan...who blends idealism with cold-blooded nastiness, sets forth in this playback not only his own life and times-but also what it means to be on the other side of the barricades, away from the hearth where the bowls aren't always full...Grogan's chronicle of his life in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco...is most interesting." -"The New York Times Book Review" "The autobiography of a sometime saint...an astonishing mass of raw experience. It blows myths, settles scores and leaves one pondering the invisible rules by which history and individuals impinge upon one another." -"Life" "Superman of the Underground." -"The Times" (London) "Emmett Grogan is the "nom de plume" of a youthful author whose autobiography "Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps" will likely cause a stir when it is published." -"Publishers Weekly" A "lengthy, indulgent but intermittently fascinating autobiography of head Digger Emmett Grogan." -"The Washington Post" "The story of the San Francisco Diggers, pioneers of the Haight-Ashbury scene, told engagingly by the head Digger himself." -"The San Francisco Chronicle" "[The San Francisco Diggers] combined Dada street theater with the revolutionary politics of free. Slum-alley saints, they lit up the period by spreading the poetry of love and anarchy with broad strokes of artistic genius. Their free store, communications network of instant offset survival poetry, along with Indian-inspiredconsciousness, was the original white light of the era. Emmett Grogan was the hippie warrior par excellence. He was also a junkie, a maniac, a gifted actor, a rebel hero, ...and above all a pain in the ass to all his friends. "Ringolevio "[is]" "half-brilliant,""" -Abbie Hoffman

About this edition

• Publisher: Rebel Inc.
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0862418933
• ISBN 13: 9780862418939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480