Utne Reader Book Reviews: November-December 2008

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Middle America Fights Back
Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland
edited by Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair (AK Press)

There’s more to U.S. politics than the white noise emanating from the coasts. The 43 disparate essays and interviews in Red State Rebels, many of them originally published in the muckraking biweekly newsletter CounterPunch, cover such stories as the government’s Ruby Ridge siege in Idaho, resistance to the
Mount Graham telescope in Arizona, “plowshares” actions against weapons of mass destruction in North Dakota, and the growing secession movement nationwide. Environmental activist David Brower, quoted partway through, sets the tone for the whole book: “Every time I’ve compromised, I’ve lost.” Whether providing accounts of flaming defeats or tales of courage, hope, and victory, Red State Rebels offers an antidote to timidity. —Chris Dodge

A Boy’s Life: Uncensored
Fight Scenes
by Greg Bottoms (Counterpoint)

Being a teenage boy is tragically common and altogether trite: A thick slab of the population used to be young men, and many of us wrestled with idiocy. Still, it’s the weird or vicious things you remember. The time that kid ate a bird. Or when someone swung at you with an actual sword. In Fight Scenes, Greg Bottoms reflects on the flotsam of his adolescent memories—pornographic Polaroids, a mentally disabled boy incited to expose himself—and finds that male intimacy sometimes meant keeping victims close at hand. Slinking somewhere to the left of autobiography (Bottoms says it’s best to read memoir as fiction), these stories speak to anyone who remembers the anxious currency of the word fag. —Michael Rowe

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