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Summer On Fire
The temperature is scorching in Detroit during the summer of 1967 and so is everything happening in this fictionalized memoir by a staff member of the long-running Fifth Estate magazine.
The characters are thrust into tumultuous episodes of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, anti-war demonstrations, fighting fascists, rock and roll at the Grande Ballroom, drugs, anarchism, the White Panther Party, Wilhelm Reich, and a bomb plot that provide “a people’s history and radical folklore of Detroit.” The setting is seven weeks in a critical year that demands ethical choices by all involved, ones which mirror today’s crises.
The characters are thrust into tumultuous episodes of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, anti-war demonstrations, fighting fascists, rock and roll at the Grande Ballroom, drugs, anarchism, the White Panther Party, Wilhelm Reich, and a bomb plot that provide “a people’s history and radical folklore of Detroit.” The setting is seven weeks in a critical year that demands ethical choices by all involved, ones which mirror today’s crises.
262 pages, Paperback
Published March 12, 2021
About the author
Peter Werbe
5 books2 followersPeter Werbe is a long-time figure in alternative and commercial media in Detroit, and a political activist.. He is a member of the editorial board of the Fifth Estate magazine.
His professional career was as a DJ on Detroit's major rock stations, WABX, WWWW. WRIF, and WCSX. He hosted Nightcall, WRIF's phone-in talk show, that was the longest running such program in U.S. radio history, 1970-2016.
He is the author of Summer On Fire: A Detroit Novel.
His professional career was as a DJ on Detroit's major rock stations, WABX, WWWW. WRIF, and WCSX. He hosted Nightcall, WRIF's phone-in talk show, that was the longest running such program in U.S. radio history, 1970-2016.
He is the author of Summer On Fire: A Detroit Novel.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 6, 2021
Peter Werbe’s book, Summer on Fire, is a Detroit novel, a Detroit history and absolutely compelling reading from start to finish.
It is unconventional fiction. When was the last time you read a novel with footnotes? A lot of footnotes, which thankfully don’t clutter up the story and instead can be found on Werbe’s website. https://www.peterwerbe.org My printer gobbled 13 sheets when I printed them out.
The novel also has a soundtrack. Eighty songs and musical artists get a mention in the story and 60 of the songs are now in an eclectic Spotify playlist. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/18x...
Summer on Fire is mostly set in Detroit’s turbulent summer of 1967. Turbulent is putting it mildly. Tragic or catastrophic might be more accurate. Forty-two people died, almost 2,000 were injured and 2,000 businesses and homes went up in flames in what the Kerner Commission later termed a “race riot.” Today, it’s more often called an uprising. Werbe calls it a rebellion.
The Kerner Commission documented more than 100 "race riots" in the summer of 1967. Roughly 400 American soldiers a month died in Vietnam that summer. More than 11,000 would die in `1967. While no one officially kept track of Vietnamese deaths, American military officers at the time aimed for a kill ratio of ten enemy deaths for every American one, and often bragged about surpassing that ratio. And that’s not counting civilian deaths. Or maybe, as Werbe maintains, the military did count them as enemies.
Today, we look back fondly at 1967’s summer as the “Summer of Love.” We celebrated its 50th anniversary just a few years ago.
Some of Werbe’s descriptions of the violence in the rebellion moved me beyond words. In particular, his account of the summary execution of three Black teenagers at the Algiers Motel surpasses John Hersey’s in his iconic book, The Algiers Motel Incident. Werbe said he hadn’t read Hersey’s book before he wrote that sequence but has read it since. While Hersey was bound by the constraints of journalism, Werbe was free to convey his own strong feelings through his characters. But he grew so depressed writing about the rebellion that he almost gave up working on the novel.
There is much more than the rebellion in this book. In the weeks before the violent upheaval, anti-war radicals, and a host of others, marched in the streets of Detroit. Fueled by marijuana and LSD, and mesmerized by the psychedelic light shows, they danced and sweated at the Grande Ballroom to Detroit’s MC5 and other local bands. Werbe’s description of the Grande is particularly vivid.
Throughout the book, Werbe frequently lurches into digressions about Detroit architecture, restaurants that no longer exist, previous urban upheavals, tales of anarchists, old bomb plots and Michigan State University’s shameful involvement in the Vietnam War. Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Freud whose unusual ideas regarding sexual energy – orgone energy – eventually led to his incarceration in federal prison where he died, is a major digression. Yet, the chaotic structure of Werbe’s novel perfectly captures the times and provides an undeniable authenticity. And it is never boring.
Peter Werbe was the heart and soul of The Fifth Estate, Detroit’s radical counterculture underground newspaper founded by 17-year-old Harvey Ovshinksy in 1965. Werbe edited and wrote hundreds of articles. But he is best known for his 45 years as the host of Nightcall on WRIF-FM in Detroit. He also worked as a disc jockey at several other Detroit FM stations while continuing to contribute to The Fifth Estate and other radical publications. He has never lost his radical roots. Summer on Fire does not bear a copyright and the book is dedicated to the anarchist Frederico Arcos.
This book is not easy to find. It is published by Black & Red Books in paperback and there is no ebook edition. Werbe's website lists some of the bookstores and places where you can order it.
It is unconventional fiction. When was the last time you read a novel with footnotes? A lot of footnotes, which thankfully don’t clutter up the story and instead can be found on Werbe’s website. https://www.peterwerbe.org My printer gobbled 13 sheets when I printed them out.
The novel also has a soundtrack. Eighty songs and musical artists get a mention in the story and 60 of the songs are now in an eclectic Spotify playlist. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/18x...
Summer on Fire is mostly set in Detroit’s turbulent summer of 1967. Turbulent is putting it mildly. Tragic or catastrophic might be more accurate. Forty-two people died, almost 2,000 were injured and 2,000 businesses and homes went up in flames in what the Kerner Commission later termed a “race riot.” Today, it’s more often called an uprising. Werbe calls it a rebellion.
The Kerner Commission documented more than 100 "race riots" in the summer of 1967. Roughly 400 American soldiers a month died in Vietnam that summer. More than 11,000 would die in `1967. While no one officially kept track of Vietnamese deaths, American military officers at the time aimed for a kill ratio of ten enemy deaths for every American one, and often bragged about surpassing that ratio. And that’s not counting civilian deaths. Or maybe, as Werbe maintains, the military did count them as enemies.
Today, we look back fondly at 1967’s summer as the “Summer of Love.” We celebrated its 50th anniversary just a few years ago.
Some of Werbe’s descriptions of the violence in the rebellion moved me beyond words. In particular, his account of the summary execution of three Black teenagers at the Algiers Motel surpasses John Hersey’s in his iconic book, The Algiers Motel Incident. Werbe said he hadn’t read Hersey’s book before he wrote that sequence but has read it since. While Hersey was bound by the constraints of journalism, Werbe was free to convey his own strong feelings through his characters. But he grew so depressed writing about the rebellion that he almost gave up working on the novel.
There is much more than the rebellion in this book. In the weeks before the violent upheaval, anti-war radicals, and a host of others, marched in the streets of Detroit. Fueled by marijuana and LSD, and mesmerized by the psychedelic light shows, they danced and sweated at the Grande Ballroom to Detroit’s MC5 and other local bands. Werbe’s description of the Grande is particularly vivid.
Throughout the book, Werbe frequently lurches into digressions about Detroit architecture, restaurants that no longer exist, previous urban upheavals, tales of anarchists, old bomb plots and Michigan State University’s shameful involvement in the Vietnam War. Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Freud whose unusual ideas regarding sexual energy – orgone energy – eventually led to his incarceration in federal prison where he died, is a major digression. Yet, the chaotic structure of Werbe’s novel perfectly captures the times and provides an undeniable authenticity. And it is never boring.
Peter Werbe was the heart and soul of The Fifth Estate, Detroit’s radical counterculture underground newspaper founded by 17-year-old Harvey Ovshinksy in 1965. Werbe edited and wrote hundreds of articles. But he is best known for his 45 years as the host of Nightcall on WRIF-FM in Detroit. He also worked as a disc jockey at several other Detroit FM stations while continuing to contribute to The Fifth Estate and other radical publications. He has never lost his radical roots. Summer on Fire does not bear a copyright and the book is dedicated to the anarchist Frederico Arcos.
This book is not easy to find. It is published by Black & Red Books in paperback and there is no ebook edition. Werbe's website lists some of the bookstores and places where you can order it.
March 27, 2023
review of
Peter Werbe's Summer on Fire, A Detroit Novel
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 22-27, 2023
For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticW...
1st off, I want to say that I learned some things of importance to me from reading this & that its being in novel form helped me be entertained at the same time. I'm giving this bk a 4 star rating, wch is positive, & I want the reader to understand that I liked & value it. I'm starting off this way b/c much of what follows is a bit critical & I don't want the reader to think I'm writing off this bk or its author.
Whenever I review something I'm likely, or 'inevitably', going to bring something to the review that 'filters', i.e.: influences, it. In this case, it cd be something as 'simple' as personal experiences of Detroit &/or the tales of other friends' personal experiences there. Wd that it were so simple. Since the yr that's central to this bk's tale is 1967 & since I was alive then, albeit younger than the author, my memories of that time are going to influence what I get out of the bk. E.G.: Werbe mentions music of the time, bands that played at the Grande, & most of these are bands that I listened to as well so there's some shared territory there. Given this shared territory that means that I make comparisons between my own experience & those recounted by the author. That helps me gauge how realistic I think the story is.
Most importantly, I'm an anarchist & so's the author. Given that I try to avoid divide-&-conquer traps that also means that even when I'm critical I don't want to write off the author's POV (Point Of View) b/c I want to respect the diversity of anarchist opinions. That's where it gets tricky b/c I can be a very fractious person - it seems that even in my simplest most affable form I find myself in conflict w/ my fellow humans. SO, I approached reading this bk & I approach writing this review w/ some trepidation b/c I am, after all, a CRITIC, a highly unpopular type of person but someone who tries to mean what they say instead of just saying what other people want to hear, but also someone who wants to further many or most of the causes presented in the story.
What I'm getting at, before I even get to the bk under study, is that reading about these subjects in novel form creates a whole different set of problems for me than reading about them in non-fiction form. I prefer Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist or Ann Hansen's Direct Action - Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, both of wch I took to be fairly honest & straight-forward accts of political activism of a nature I haven't personally participated in, to reading a fictionalized acct of any activism, regardless of whether it's similar to my own or not.
In my review of my friend Spat Cannon's fictionalized activist autobiography Press Here and it will all Make Sense I wrote:
"The problem w/ reviewing a friend's bk is simple: if you give it a good review, everyone's happy, the author's happy, the friendship becomes even stronger, life is good. But, for me, life is never simple, to me, writing the obligatory good-review-of-a-friend's-bk does intellectual standards a disservice. An honest review is what the world needs, not more bullshit.
"DON'T MISUNDERSTAND: I am not giving this bk a bad review, the review might be more critical if I didn't know Spat, if we weren't friends, but, basically, I'm not giving it a bad review, I'm giving it a complicated one, one that acknowledges that I'm reading this from a somewhat deeply invested perspective & that that investment dominates the reading.
"For one thing, this 'novel' is thinly disguised autobiography. People who know Spat will know this from the get-go. While Spat waxes philosophical & introspective in his guise as "Max Sutton", the narrator, for me the writing of it as 'fiction' gives it a strange feel of avoidance at times. I think I wd've preferred it as straight-forward autobiography. Of course, writing it as 'fiction' makes the interpersonal aspects less embarrassing & revealing for all concerned. Hence, it's perfectly reasonable for it to be fictionalized. Spat can tell the truth w/o having his fellow travelers feel too betrayed."
- truncated review: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... [the full review is no longer available online]
Now, I don't know Peter Werbe personally, we've had some sparse email communication & that's it. Therefore, I'm not likely to know who the fictionalized characters are or to be critical of those fictionalizations. Therefore, the 'problem' that I might have w/ Werbe's bk might be closer to those that I had w/ Jacob Wren's Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed:
"But what was perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of reading this (& others of its activist-novel ilk) was the question of: WHAT DO I THINK ABOUT WRITING NOVELS ABOUT POLITICAL ACTIVISM AT ALL? Most of my own political writings are deliberately non-fictional - they don't purport to represent "the whole truth & nothing but the truth" b/c I find such a notion to be highly problematic - but they DO attempt to be accurate & w/ my own opinions & experiences transparently displayed. In other words, I don't purport to believe in 'objectivity' but I do try to not LIE or GLAMORIZE, etc.. - & here's where the problem of fictionalization of activism comes in.
"I was interested in this B/C it's a fictionalization of an activism that may be somewhat close to the anarchist activism that my own political activities have been primarily connected to. But what I wonder is: does the fictionalization of activism open the gates to people living in fantasy worlds instead of actually BEING activists? I think of things like Arnold Schwarznegger starring in the Philip K. Dick based "Total Recall" - no doubt many an enthusiast of revolution has cheered on Schwarznegger's character in this while paying to see a movie that enriches the coffers of a man whose actual politics are never likely to come anywhere close to those of Dick's character (at its most revolutionary). In other words, activism & revolution, once displaced into fiction, run the risk of becoming escapist fantasy - no matter what the author's intention."
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8...
But that doesn't quite apply here either. What might apply more is my wondering whether I'd find the novel 'bourgeois', in 'disguise' as anarchism - wch doesn't mean that I have any strong basis for expecting this to be the case. SOO, I'll explain why this possibility wd be tickling my backbrain (sounds uncomfortable doesn't it?!). Werbe is a member of the editorial board of Fifth Estate magazine. Fifth Estate has been around since 1965 & is currently called an "Anarchist Review of Books". I 1st encountered the term "anarchist" or "anarchism" or "anarchy" when I was 16 yrs old in 1969 or 1970 & realized that I was an anarchist. I became aware of anarchist (a)periodicals in the 1980s when I was publishing & trading frequently. I'm sure I wd've known about Fifth Estate by then, probably the mid-'80s at the latest.
But, for whatever reason (or lack thereof), I never had much interest in Fifth Estate. I think it seemed somehow too 'mainstream' for me, I was based in Baltimore where the oldest anarchist activity that I was aware of was Social Anarchism & their associated radio program The Great Atlantic Radio Conspiracy. I only have 3 publications by them in my extensive personal library: the "Winter, 1980 Vol. 1, No. 1" issue, the "Volume 3, Number 2 1983" issue, & "Research Group One Report No. 25". The latter being the one most appealing to me b/c it has a sense of humor & an imaginative design. Still, all in all, Social Anarchism was too academic for me. My life at the time that I discovered Social Anarchism was extremely different from what I took to be the lives of their writers & editors. It was hard for me to relate. I remember writing a hand-written letter to them questioning whether they cd be so staid & still represent anarchists. I was working hard labor construction & getting drunk & partying fairly constantly, taking risks in my life & still managing to be constantly creative. The Social Anarchism crowd seemed so safe in contrast. I imagine that I seemed like a cliché to them. I don't think they ever replied.
I remember talking w/ one of their younger staff at the 1986 Haymarket Centennial in Chicago, proposing that I collaborate w/ them, & he replied in exactly the bourgeois way I expect saying that he didn't think we'd be compatible or some such. He was vvvveeeerrrrryyyyy straight & I was very much the opposite. Still, I considered collaborating w/ Social Anarchism b/c I figured we were all BalTimOre-based anarchists. The point here, vis à vis Fifth Estate is that when I was talking w/ a fellow Pittsburgh anarchist recently about them she sd they never interested her very much b/c they seemed so academic. In other words, she had a similar reaction to my own.
The anarchist (a)periodicals that I had the most interest in were the ones where I felt like I cd trade w/ the editors, where there were no grammatical or spelling rules to reign in one's writerly imagination. To quote from my review of Brian Gentry's Adventures in Ontological Dissonance - or Why I Have No Money:
"Perhaps Anarchy & Fifth Estate seemed too much like commercial products. I've had the closest connection to the anarchist magazines that I published:
"DDC#040.002 & Street Rat(bag)
"to the ones that I contributed to the most:
"Factsheet Five, Popular Reality [was that anarchist?], & Reality Sandwich
"& to a few others that didn't have the longevity of Anarchy & Fifth Estate that may or may not've been entirely anarchist:
"The Monthly Me@nder, Mad Woman, Krylon Underground, Black Eye, Awake! - the second yearly report of !po-po!, Guinea Pig Zero, Green Anarchist, & at least a few others.
"Ones that were also known to me that I never contributed to were: Love & Rage, The Match, Eat My Shit, a New England based publication inspired by Lysander Spooner, an Appalachian-based Earth First type publication, etc.. At this point, there're too many whose names I've forgotten."
- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticO...
Fifth Estate provides a "Manuscript Style Sheet" that they expect 'submissions' for publication to adhere to. Below is an excerpt from that:
"Manuscript Style Sheet
"Manuscripts should be submitted in 12pt Times New Roman, 1.5-spaced between lines, flush left. We prefer them in Microsoft Word, but will accept and consider all formats including typescript and handwritten.
"No indentation; the InDesign desktop publishing program has an auto indent function which will be screwed up by any in the manuscript.
"No underlined words; use ital. Book and publication titles in ital; articles and movies with quote marks.
"Single space between sentences; no space between paragraphs. Do not use bold for anything in the text. Use ital sparingly for emphasis; never use capital letters for this.
"No use of Post Office abbreviations in text. Michigan is Mich., not MI; California is Calif., not CA."
- https://www.fifthestate.org/contact-f...
To me, that "style sheet" is authoritarian & antithetical to creative anarchist writing. No Concrete Poetry allowed? In their "Writer's Guidelines" they state: "The Fifth Estate accepts articles, essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry. We strive to maintain a tone in FE that is engaging and informative to all readers. To that end, we seek writing that is plainly written, free of jargon, and in a non-academic style." ( https://www.fifthestate.org/contact-f... ) To me, these rules are akin to the popular notion that all working class writing must have a small vocabulary b/c 'working class people are stupid & borderline illiterate'. Well, I'm working class & if all the writing that I ever read was by people like Charles Bukowski I'd find it awfully depressing.
Restrictions such as the above-quoted "No indentation; the InDesign desktop publishing program has an auto indent function which will be screwed up by any in the manuscript" are perfect examples of what I call the effects of AU (Artificial Unintelligence). Instead of doing the work to over-ride the limitations of the app they use the editors choose to restrict the contributors to the limits of the app instead. The omnipresence of algorithms is creating this effect on a vast scale. A movie that I made called "List4n" (on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/NVaxAJJXJI8
- on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/list-4n ) calls attn to the limits of AU vs the human mind insofar as the synthetic voice that reads the text is unable to make adaptive leaps that the human mind can. Another relevant movie of mine is called "Artificial Unintelligence" (on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/Iw-rTflW-EQ - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/artificia... ).
I make a distinction between academic & scholarly that the FE staff apparently don't: academic means towing the line of 'correct procedure' that's taught to people, it's something that one is expected to conform to if one wants to 'make the grade'. Scholarly is something that backs up its assertions by referencing other sources - Ivan Illich is a great example of a scholarly writer whose superabundance of footnotes might be extremely off-putting to lazy readers.
Fifth Estate, to me, is conventionally journalistic at a meta-level that's important, again, to me, to scrutinize or, at least, take into consideration. In Peter Werbe's "Take the Big Stuff" article quoted below he states that "This newspaper has concentrated its observations on the hippie, new left, and avant garde community it serves." Note the presence of "avant garde". I find that interesting since there's nothing particularly avant garde about FE that I've noticed. Conventional journalism is written at an 8th grade reading level in order to be readable to the 'masses' - whether it's the mainstream newspapers or the underground ones. Alas, that's also the approach of TV 'News'. Ultimately, such LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) 'reporting' tends to reinforce a simple-mindedness that's more susceptible to propaganda.
SOOO, as you've obviously figured out, I have a less-than-enthusiastic attitude toward Fifth Estate & knowing that this novel is written by one of the editors I was immediately wary. In their 1st issue, it's stated:
"Editorial
by Harvey Ovshinsky
Fifth Estate # 1, November 19-December 2, 1965
"There are four estates, the fourth of which is journalism. We are the fifth because we are something different than Detroit’s other newspapers. We hope to fill a void in that fourth estate a void created by party-controlled newspapers and the cutting of those articles which might express the more liberal viewpoint. That’s what we really are–the voice (I hate that word) of the liberal element of Detroit. This does not mean that everything in the paper will be slanted or written with the so-called “far left” creeping through every space. We want to be a truly free press. If it’s good, if it has a name, and if it’s sincere, it will be in the Fifth Estate. If not, you can probably find it in the News.
"There is no editorial because this paper does not have a policy. I may have personal bias and certainly will print it but not here and not in an editorial. If I want to say something, it will be in a column. This paper is only a sounding board for new ideas, events that would need and do not get proper publicity. Letters to the Editor not published in the News or Free Press can be printed in our letter column. We will be labeled radical, socialist and communist. But you can call us just “honest”. It’s what were going to try hard to be."
- https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/1...
Now I respect that statement, esp the "you can call us just “honest”" but you'll notice that anarchist doesn't enter into it, they self-define as "liberal". That was 1965. The novel's main action takes place in 1967 & Fifth Estate is described throughout as anarchist. SOOOO, one of my 1st 'duties' as a reviewer here is to check whether Fifth Estate was identifying itself as "anarchist" in the summer of 1967.
"“Get the big stuff”
by Peter Werbe
Fifth Estate # 35, August 1-15, 1967
"“The chickens are coming home to roost” —Malcolm X, Nov. 22, 1963
"Malcolm was right, of course, and the chickens have come home so many ways since that grim day four years ago. Vietnam, Malcolm’s own death, riots across the country and now the biggest chicken of them all—the Detroit riot.
"Detroit always does things up in a big way.
"The destruction, looting, killing, and violence have been chronicled to such an extent that no repetition is necessary here.
"This newspaper has concentrated its observations on the hippie, new left, and avant garde community it serves.
"The geographical center of that community—the Warren Forest area near Wayne University—was relatively untouched by the holocaust.
"The Fifth Estate office at Warren and John Lodge was unharmed as were the adjacent offices of the Artists’ Workshop, Trans-Love, Energies, and the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Our newspaper office sported a “soul brother” sign and two large banners were hung from Trans-Love reading “Peace on Earth” and “Burn, Baby, Burn.”
"Hippie and political residents of the Warren Forest area reacted to the situation just like their poorer neighbors—they took whatever wasn’t nailed down."
- https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/3...
For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticW...
Peter Werbe's Summer on Fire, A Detroit Novel
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 22-27, 2023
For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticW...
1st off, I want to say that I learned some things of importance to me from reading this & that its being in novel form helped me be entertained at the same time. I'm giving this bk a 4 star rating, wch is positive, & I want the reader to understand that I liked & value it. I'm starting off this way b/c much of what follows is a bit critical & I don't want the reader to think I'm writing off this bk or its author.
Whenever I review something I'm likely, or 'inevitably', going to bring something to the review that 'filters', i.e.: influences, it. In this case, it cd be something as 'simple' as personal experiences of Detroit &/or the tales of other friends' personal experiences there. Wd that it were so simple. Since the yr that's central to this bk's tale is 1967 & since I was alive then, albeit younger than the author, my memories of that time are going to influence what I get out of the bk. E.G.: Werbe mentions music of the time, bands that played at the Grande, & most of these are bands that I listened to as well so there's some shared territory there. Given this shared territory that means that I make comparisons between my own experience & those recounted by the author. That helps me gauge how realistic I think the story is.
Most importantly, I'm an anarchist & so's the author. Given that I try to avoid divide-&-conquer traps that also means that even when I'm critical I don't want to write off the author's POV (Point Of View) b/c I want to respect the diversity of anarchist opinions. That's where it gets tricky b/c I can be a very fractious person - it seems that even in my simplest most affable form I find myself in conflict w/ my fellow humans. SO, I approached reading this bk & I approach writing this review w/ some trepidation b/c I am, after all, a CRITIC, a highly unpopular type of person but someone who tries to mean what they say instead of just saying what other people want to hear, but also someone who wants to further many or most of the causes presented in the story.
What I'm getting at, before I even get to the bk under study, is that reading about these subjects in novel form creates a whole different set of problems for me than reading about them in non-fiction form. I prefer Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist or Ann Hansen's Direct Action - Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, both of wch I took to be fairly honest & straight-forward accts of political activism of a nature I haven't personally participated in, to reading a fictionalized acct of any activism, regardless of whether it's similar to my own or not.
In my review of my friend Spat Cannon's fictionalized activist autobiography Press Here and it will all Make Sense I wrote:
"The problem w/ reviewing a friend's bk is simple: if you give it a good review, everyone's happy, the author's happy, the friendship becomes even stronger, life is good. But, for me, life is never simple, to me, writing the obligatory good-review-of-a-friend's-bk does intellectual standards a disservice. An honest review is what the world needs, not more bullshit.
"DON'T MISUNDERSTAND: I am not giving this bk a bad review, the review might be more critical if I didn't know Spat, if we weren't friends, but, basically, I'm not giving it a bad review, I'm giving it a complicated one, one that acknowledges that I'm reading this from a somewhat deeply invested perspective & that that investment dominates the reading.
"For one thing, this 'novel' is thinly disguised autobiography. People who know Spat will know this from the get-go. While Spat waxes philosophical & introspective in his guise as "Max Sutton", the narrator, for me the writing of it as 'fiction' gives it a strange feel of avoidance at times. I think I wd've preferred it as straight-forward autobiography. Of course, writing it as 'fiction' makes the interpersonal aspects less embarrassing & revealing for all concerned. Hence, it's perfectly reasonable for it to be fictionalized. Spat can tell the truth w/o having his fellow travelers feel too betrayed."
- truncated review: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... [the full review is no longer available online]
Now, I don't know Peter Werbe personally, we've had some sparse email communication & that's it. Therefore, I'm not likely to know who the fictionalized characters are or to be critical of those fictionalizations. Therefore, the 'problem' that I might have w/ Werbe's bk might be closer to those that I had w/ Jacob Wren's Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed:
"But what was perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of reading this (& others of its activist-novel ilk) was the question of: WHAT DO I THINK ABOUT WRITING NOVELS ABOUT POLITICAL ACTIVISM AT ALL? Most of my own political writings are deliberately non-fictional - they don't purport to represent "the whole truth & nothing but the truth" b/c I find such a notion to be highly problematic - but they DO attempt to be accurate & w/ my own opinions & experiences transparently displayed. In other words, I don't purport to believe in 'objectivity' but I do try to not LIE or GLAMORIZE, etc.. - & here's where the problem of fictionalization of activism comes in.
"I was interested in this B/C it's a fictionalization of an activism that may be somewhat close to the anarchist activism that my own political activities have been primarily connected to. But what I wonder is: does the fictionalization of activism open the gates to people living in fantasy worlds instead of actually BEING activists? I think of things like Arnold Schwarznegger starring in the Philip K. Dick based "Total Recall" - no doubt many an enthusiast of revolution has cheered on Schwarznegger's character in this while paying to see a movie that enriches the coffers of a man whose actual politics are never likely to come anywhere close to those of Dick's character (at its most revolutionary). In other words, activism & revolution, once displaced into fiction, run the risk of becoming escapist fantasy - no matter what the author's intention."
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8...
But that doesn't quite apply here either. What might apply more is my wondering whether I'd find the novel 'bourgeois', in 'disguise' as anarchism - wch doesn't mean that I have any strong basis for expecting this to be the case. SOO, I'll explain why this possibility wd be tickling my backbrain (sounds uncomfortable doesn't it?!). Werbe is a member of the editorial board of Fifth Estate magazine. Fifth Estate has been around since 1965 & is currently called an "Anarchist Review of Books". I 1st encountered the term "anarchist" or "anarchism" or "anarchy" when I was 16 yrs old in 1969 or 1970 & realized that I was an anarchist. I became aware of anarchist (a)periodicals in the 1980s when I was publishing & trading frequently. I'm sure I wd've known about Fifth Estate by then, probably the mid-'80s at the latest.
But, for whatever reason (or lack thereof), I never had much interest in Fifth Estate. I think it seemed somehow too 'mainstream' for me, I was based in Baltimore where the oldest anarchist activity that I was aware of was Social Anarchism & their associated radio program The Great Atlantic Radio Conspiracy. I only have 3 publications by them in my extensive personal library: the "Winter, 1980 Vol. 1, No. 1" issue, the "Volume 3, Number 2 1983" issue, & "Research Group One Report No. 25". The latter being the one most appealing to me b/c it has a sense of humor & an imaginative design. Still, all in all, Social Anarchism was too academic for me. My life at the time that I discovered Social Anarchism was extremely different from what I took to be the lives of their writers & editors. It was hard for me to relate. I remember writing a hand-written letter to them questioning whether they cd be so staid & still represent anarchists. I was working hard labor construction & getting drunk & partying fairly constantly, taking risks in my life & still managing to be constantly creative. The Social Anarchism crowd seemed so safe in contrast. I imagine that I seemed like a cliché to them. I don't think they ever replied.
I remember talking w/ one of their younger staff at the 1986 Haymarket Centennial in Chicago, proposing that I collaborate w/ them, & he replied in exactly the bourgeois way I expect saying that he didn't think we'd be compatible or some such. He was vvvveeeerrrrryyyyy straight & I was very much the opposite. Still, I considered collaborating w/ Social Anarchism b/c I figured we were all BalTimOre-based anarchists. The point here, vis à vis Fifth Estate is that when I was talking w/ a fellow Pittsburgh anarchist recently about them she sd they never interested her very much b/c they seemed so academic. In other words, she had a similar reaction to my own.
The anarchist (a)periodicals that I had the most interest in were the ones where I felt like I cd trade w/ the editors, where there were no grammatical or spelling rules to reign in one's writerly imagination. To quote from my review of Brian Gentry's Adventures in Ontological Dissonance - or Why I Have No Money:
"Perhaps Anarchy & Fifth Estate seemed too much like commercial products. I've had the closest connection to the anarchist magazines that I published:
"DDC#040.002 & Street Rat(bag)
"to the ones that I contributed to the most:
"Factsheet Five, Popular Reality [was that anarchist?], & Reality Sandwich
"& to a few others that didn't have the longevity of Anarchy & Fifth Estate that may or may not've been entirely anarchist:
"The Monthly Me@nder, Mad Woman, Krylon Underground, Black Eye, Awake! - the second yearly report of !po-po!, Guinea Pig Zero, Green Anarchist, & at least a few others.
"Ones that were also known to me that I never contributed to were: Love & Rage, The Match, Eat My Shit, a New England based publication inspired by Lysander Spooner, an Appalachian-based Earth First type publication, etc.. At this point, there're too many whose names I've forgotten."
- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticO...
Fifth Estate provides a "Manuscript Style Sheet" that they expect 'submissions' for publication to adhere to. Below is an excerpt from that:
"Manuscript Style Sheet
"Manuscripts should be submitted in 12pt Times New Roman, 1.5-spaced between lines, flush left. We prefer them in Microsoft Word, but will accept and consider all formats including typescript and handwritten.
"No indentation; the InDesign desktop publishing program has an auto indent function which will be screwed up by any in the manuscript.
"No underlined words; use ital. Book and publication titles in ital; articles and movies with quote marks.
"Single space between sentences; no space between paragraphs. Do not use bold for anything in the text. Use ital sparingly for emphasis; never use capital letters for this.
"No use of Post Office abbreviations in text. Michigan is Mich., not MI; California is Calif., not CA."
- https://www.fifthestate.org/contact-f...
To me, that "style sheet" is authoritarian & antithetical to creative anarchist writing. No Concrete Poetry allowed? In their "Writer's Guidelines" they state: "The Fifth Estate accepts articles, essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry. We strive to maintain a tone in FE that is engaging and informative to all readers. To that end, we seek writing that is plainly written, free of jargon, and in a non-academic style." ( https://www.fifthestate.org/contact-f... ) To me, these rules are akin to the popular notion that all working class writing must have a small vocabulary b/c 'working class people are stupid & borderline illiterate'. Well, I'm working class & if all the writing that I ever read was by people like Charles Bukowski I'd find it awfully depressing.
Restrictions such as the above-quoted "No indentation; the InDesign desktop publishing program has an auto indent function which will be screwed up by any in the manuscript" are perfect examples of what I call the effects of AU (Artificial Unintelligence). Instead of doing the work to over-ride the limitations of the app they use the editors choose to restrict the contributors to the limits of the app instead. The omnipresence of algorithms is creating this effect on a vast scale. A movie that I made called "List4n" (on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/NVaxAJJXJI8
- on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/list-4n ) calls attn to the limits of AU vs the human mind insofar as the synthetic voice that reads the text is unable to make adaptive leaps that the human mind can. Another relevant movie of mine is called "Artificial Unintelligence" (on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/Iw-rTflW-EQ - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/artificia... ).
I make a distinction between academic & scholarly that the FE staff apparently don't: academic means towing the line of 'correct procedure' that's taught to people, it's something that one is expected to conform to if one wants to 'make the grade'. Scholarly is something that backs up its assertions by referencing other sources - Ivan Illich is a great example of a scholarly writer whose superabundance of footnotes might be extremely off-putting to lazy readers.
Fifth Estate, to me, is conventionally journalistic at a meta-level that's important, again, to me, to scrutinize or, at least, take into consideration. In Peter Werbe's "Take the Big Stuff" article quoted below he states that "This newspaper has concentrated its observations on the hippie, new left, and avant garde community it serves." Note the presence of "avant garde". I find that interesting since there's nothing particularly avant garde about FE that I've noticed. Conventional journalism is written at an 8th grade reading level in order to be readable to the 'masses' - whether it's the mainstream newspapers or the underground ones. Alas, that's also the approach of TV 'News'. Ultimately, such LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) 'reporting' tends to reinforce a simple-mindedness that's more susceptible to propaganda.
SOOO, as you've obviously figured out, I have a less-than-enthusiastic attitude toward Fifth Estate & knowing that this novel is written by one of the editors I was immediately wary. In their 1st issue, it's stated:
"Editorial
by Harvey Ovshinsky
Fifth Estate # 1, November 19-December 2, 1965
"There are four estates, the fourth of which is journalism. We are the fifth because we are something different than Detroit’s other newspapers. We hope to fill a void in that fourth estate a void created by party-controlled newspapers and the cutting of those articles which might express the more liberal viewpoint. That’s what we really are–the voice (I hate that word) of the liberal element of Detroit. This does not mean that everything in the paper will be slanted or written with the so-called “far left” creeping through every space. We want to be a truly free press. If it’s good, if it has a name, and if it’s sincere, it will be in the Fifth Estate. If not, you can probably find it in the News.
"There is no editorial because this paper does not have a policy. I may have personal bias and certainly will print it but not here and not in an editorial. If I want to say something, it will be in a column. This paper is only a sounding board for new ideas, events that would need and do not get proper publicity. Letters to the Editor not published in the News or Free Press can be printed in our letter column. We will be labeled radical, socialist and communist. But you can call us just “honest”. It’s what were going to try hard to be."
- https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/1...
Now I respect that statement, esp the "you can call us just “honest”" but you'll notice that anarchist doesn't enter into it, they self-define as "liberal". That was 1965. The novel's main action takes place in 1967 & Fifth Estate is described throughout as anarchist. SOOOO, one of my 1st 'duties' as a reviewer here is to check whether Fifth Estate was identifying itself as "anarchist" in the summer of 1967.
"“Get the big stuff”
by Peter Werbe
Fifth Estate # 35, August 1-15, 1967
"“The chickens are coming home to roost” —Malcolm X, Nov. 22, 1963
"Malcolm was right, of course, and the chickens have come home so many ways since that grim day four years ago. Vietnam, Malcolm’s own death, riots across the country and now the biggest chicken of them all—the Detroit riot.
"Detroit always does things up in a big way.
"The destruction, looting, killing, and violence have been chronicled to such an extent that no repetition is necessary here.
"This newspaper has concentrated its observations on the hippie, new left, and avant garde community it serves.
"The geographical center of that community—the Warren Forest area near Wayne University—was relatively untouched by the holocaust.
"The Fifth Estate office at Warren and John Lodge was unharmed as were the adjacent offices of the Artists’ Workshop, Trans-Love, Energies, and the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Our newspaper office sported a “soul brother” sign and two large banners were hung from Trans-Love reading “Peace on Earth” and “Burn, Baby, Burn.”
"Hippie and political residents of the Warren Forest area reacted to the situation just like their poorer neighbors—they took whatever wasn’t nailed down."
- https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/3...
For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticW...
July 10, 2021
Basically, it was a short story running through a non-fiction book and neither was very fleshed out. The author should have chosen one and stuck to it.
April 23, 2021
Fascinating account of the tempestuous summer of the 1967 Detroit riots. The book brings back memories of my young teen years living in a western suburb of Detroit during the Vietnam war. Interesting characters that speak in the language of the time and who take you with them on their rocky journey.
October 26, 2021
This exciting picaresque novel is a fictional tour-de-force of Detroit history during the hot summer of 1967, refracted through the experiences and imagination of a long-time Detroit radical and media personality. Much to savor about the times, both good and bad, but always brought to life in a lively rendering of the period.
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February 28, 2023I started this book because my father who died almost two years ago knew the writer Peter Werbe, so I was thinking reading this book would give me a connection to my father, plus Peter Werbe had a radio show in Detroit for a long time that I enjoyed listening too. I don't read a lot of fiction because for the most part it's just not my cup of tea. I stopped reading this book on page 70 something. The book was well written and it was historically accurate, however I stopped this book because it just wasn't for me. Which is why I decided not to give this book a rating.
June 16, 2023
This book was...fine. It was an enjoyable enough read that didn't do much for me. I was really interested in reading this because my dad grew up in Detroit and was a pre-teen during the riots living in one of the neighborhoods at the center of it all, so was hoping for some perspective and to learn a lot more about the experience of living there and the pulse on the ground. This book isn't that -- the riots are merely the background scenery, but the thrust of the story is really about the anti-occupation of Vietnam sentiments of the time, with the race riots a mild inconvenience to some of the actions the group of main characters wanted to partake in. And about the characters, there is a good handful of them and they are all in every scene which made trying to keep up with who was who nearly impossible. Thankfully about halfway through the book I realized it didn't matter, they were just kind of an interchangeable single amorphous blob of white folks so treating them as a single character didn't detract from the story at all. Given the setting and what the book purports to be about, it's a shame we don't hear more from the very few characters of color that pop up now and again.
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