Street-Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties

(Paperback)

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Tariq Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. Reissued for the 1968 anniversary, Street-Fighting Years captures the mood and energy of the era of hope and passion as Ali tracks the growing significance of the nascent protest movement. Through his own story, he recounts a counter history of the 60s rocked by the effects of the Vietnam war, the aftermath of the revolutionary insurgencies led by Che Guevara, the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring and the student protests on the streets of Europe and America. It is a story that takes us from Paris and Prague to Hanoi and Bolivia, encountering along the way Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Henry Kissinger, and Mick Jagger. This edition includes a new introduction, as well as the famous interview conducted by Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971.

Reviews

Tariq Ali has not lost the passion and vim which made him a symbol of the spirit of '68 ... has not seen fit to join forces with the terminally cynical, or set up a graven god that can be accused of failing ... Ali has spent much of his life documenting America as the arsenal of counter-revolution. -- Christopher Hitchens
We need to remember the sixties, and Tariq Ali's book is valuable and well presented evidence of the time ... as Ali points out the transition from revolutionary to arch-conservative is nothing new ... we may frequently have been misguided, but nothing is sadder than a generation without a cause * Sunday Times *
Has me rapt on the hearthrug, peering into the embers of memory ... the Memoir proposes that the overriding themes were the confrontation with US imperialism ... the efforts of a generation to shake off the shackles of social-democracy and conduct war on capitalism a l'outrance -- Alexander Cockburn
Readable, informative and also inspirational ... the recollections of a person who has remained true to himself * Sydney Morning Herald *

Author Bio

Tariq Ali has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics the most recent of which are The Obama Syndrome, The Extreme Centre and The Dilemmas of Lenin as well as the novels of his Islam Quintet and scripts for the stage and screen. He is a longstanding member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and lives in London.