Love and Struggle: My Life in Sds, the Weather Underground, and Beyond - Paperback

by David Gilbert (Author), Boots Riley (Introduction by)

A nice Jewish boy from suburban Boston--hell, an Eagle Scout!--David Gilbert arrived at Columbia University just in time for the explosive Sixties. From the early anti-Vietnam War protests to the founding of SDS, from the Columbia Strike to the tragedy of the Townhouse, Gilbert was on the scene: as organizer, theoretician, and above all, activist. He was among the first militants who went underground to build the clandestine resistance to war and racism known as "Weatherman." And he was among the last to emerge, in captivity, after the disaster of the 1981 Brink's robbery, an attempted expropriation that resulted in four deaths and long prison terms. In this extraordinary memoir, written from the maximum-security prison where he has lived for almost thirty years, Gilbert tells the intensely personal story of his own Long March from liberal to radical to revolutionary.

Today a beloved and admired mentor to a new generation of activists, he assesses with rare humor, with an understanding stripped of illusions, and with uncommon candor the errors and advances, terrors and triumphs of the Sixties and beyond. It's a battle that was far from won, but is still not lost: the struggle to build a new world, and the love that drives that effort. A cautionary tale and a how-to as well, Love and Struggle is a book as candid, uncompromising, and humane as its author.

Author Biography

David Gilbert appeared in the Academy Award-nominated film The Weather Underground and is the author of No Surrender. He is incarcerated in the Clinton Correctional in Dannemora, New York. Boots Riley is the former leader of the Coup, a music group declared "the best hip-hop act of the past decade" by Billboard magazine. He formed a new group, Street Sweeper Social Club, with Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. He lives in Oakland, California.