Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In his late teens and early twenties, Walter Mosley was addicted to alcohol and cigarettes. Drawing from this intimate knowledge of addiction and recovery, Mosley explores the deviances of contemporary America and describes a society in thrall to its own consumption. Although Americans live in the richest country on earth, many citizens exist on the brink of poverty, and from that profound economic inequality stems self-destructive behavior.
In Twelve Steps to Political Revelation, Mosley outlines a guide to recovery from oppression. First we must identify the problems that surround us. Next we must actively work together to create a just, more holistic society. And finally, power must be returned to the embrace of the people.
Challenging and original, Recovery confronts both self-understanding and how we define ourselves in relation to others.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mosley's slim manifesto aims to foment an American "intellectual revolution," but it offers few original ideas toward realizing that end. Linking personal unhappiness to political disenfranchisement, the acclaimed thriller writer of the Easy Rawlins series, prescribes a 12-step program for kicking "Americanism" an addictive and pernicious ideology that encourages "tolerance to lies, worldwide aggression... pain and lifelong unhappiness." Social ills can be cured through communication: dialogue between the young and old, between friends, between people who have a single political agenda in common the last through a semi-conceived Web site he calls "Democracy Initiative." Elsewhere, Mosley's "steps toward revolution" might be better defined as banal exercises in self-help (he argues that therapy can be a tool for political change because it is a safe space for "revolutionary exchanges" and attaining objectivity), recapping Marx, or well-intentioned irrelevance (it's "the responsibility of every person in the nation to tell the truth at least once a day"). Though Mosley is admirably candid about his own struggles with addiction and depression, and his prose can sing, as a catalyst the book is more likely to spark frustration than epiphany
