Books Not Bombs

Anarchism is not like obscenity. You won’t always know it when you see it. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy explains it like so: "There is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, and those considered anarchists at best share a certain family resemblance." There’s individualist anarchism, socialist anarchism, collectivist anarchism, feminist anarchism, green anarchism, and quite a few more. Then there’s someone like Jennifer Silverman, who wrote a book called My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Special Needs. Is she an anarchist? We don’t know. But she is a featured speaker at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, so she might be. Or her book might be. We don’t know. Anarchism is not a subject that can be neatly labeled and stuck on a shelf, obviously. Unlike books, which can, and there are many, many fine books and publishers at the fair, on the 15th year of the event. Yes, Ward Churchill is speaking. And so are Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Andrej Grubacic, who pay tribute to the late Howard Zinn. Lierre Keith appears with her controversial book The Vegetarian Myth, which tweaks veganism. And there’s the excellent-looking panel discussion “The Revolutionary Legacy of John Brown” with Terry Bisson and William Crossman. One of the biggest treats, wherever you fall on the anarcho-spectrum, is the lecture “The Politics of Science” by Kim Stanley Robinson, award-winning science fiction writer and … anarchist?

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• Wendee Key
• Peter Taylor
• Laurie Schoeman
• Books and Literature
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The fair runs concurrent with an art show, curated by Wendee Key and featuring work by Peter Taylor, the Billboard Liberation Front, Laurie Schoeman, John Zucca, Alex MacLeitch, and more.
March 13-14, 10 a.m., 2010