About this ebook
Using memoir and flashbacks, oral history and archival sources, West of Eden explores the deep historical roots and the enduring, though often disavowed, legacies of the extraordinary pulse of radical energies that generated forms of collective life beyond the nuclear family and the world of private consumption, including the contradictions evident in such figures as the guru/predator or the hippie/entrepreneur. There are vivid portraits of life on the rural communes of Mendocino and Sonoma, and essays on the Black Panther communal households in Oakland, the latter-day Diggers of San Francisco, the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, the pioneers of live/work space for artists, and the Bucky dome as the iconic architectural form of the sixties.
Due to the prevailing amnesia—partly imposed by official narratives, partly self-imposed in the aftermath of defeat—West of Eden is not only a necessary act of reclamation, helping to record the unwritten stories of the motley generation of communards and antinomians now passing, but is also intended as an offering to the coming generation who will find here, in the rubble of the twentieth century, a past they can use—indeed one they will need—in the passage from the privations of commodity capitalism to an ample life in common.
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About the author
Iain Boal is an Irish social historian of science and technics, affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley and Birkbeck College, London. He is associated with the Retort group, and is one of the co-authors of Retort’s Afflicted Power: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso). He co-edited with James Brook Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights), and is author of The Green Machine (Notting Hill Editions), a brief planetary history of the bicycle.
Janferie Stone was a sojourner in two communes on the Mendocino Coast in the early 1970s. She has taught Native American Studies and anthropology at many levels of the California education system. Her essays have been published in Sustainable Feminisms: Advances in Gender Research, and From Rigor to Vigor: Transformations in the Field.
Michael Watts is professor of Geography and Chair of Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught for over thirty years. A Guggenheim Fellow in 2003, he served as the Director of the Institute of International Studies from 1994–2004. His research focuses on food and energy security, rural development, and land reform in Africa, South Asia, and Vietnam.
Cal Winslow is a social historian, educated at Antioch College and Warwick University. He is co-author with Edward Thompson, Peter Linebaugh, and others of Albion’s Fatal Tree. He is author of Labor’s Civil War in California (PM Press) and co-editor of Rebel Rank and File. He is the Director of the Mendocino Institute and associated with the Retort group. He lives with his family near Caspar on the Mendocino coast.
