Pick Your Battle: Your Guide to Urban Foraging, Hollywood Movies, Late Capitalism, and the Communist Alternative (a memoir) (Paperback)

Pick Your Battle: Your Guide to Urban Foraging, Hollywood Movies, Late Capitalism, and the Communist Alternative (a memoir) (Paperback)
By Douglas Lain

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First tagged by L33tminion
Customer tags: anarchism(3), media studies(2), communism(2), guy debord(2), ecology(2), lacan(2), critical theory(2), memoir(2), marxism(2), comcast(2), 90s subculture, autobiography

Review & Description

Pick Your Battle is a book that speaks to the desire for a return to nature that propels movements for sustainability, without entirely succumbing to this desire.  While remaining true to the utopian spirit he finds in various ecological trends and lifestyles, Lain dares to examine how the ideas embedded in movement for permaculture fare after being subjected to radical scrutiny.  Imagine that Slavoj Zizek or Guy Debord had written a breezy but ironic memoir about urban foraging.Pick Your Battle confronts the apocalyptic sentiments expressed by left figures such as Christopher Hedge's who, in his February 2010 essay for Adbusters entitled The Zero Point of Systemic Collapse, argued for the need to abandon reformist struggle and batten down the hatches. The book confronts the ideas expressed by figures on the right like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck.  But, while Beck worried in 2010 about what is coming out of Europe, while he fretted about the possibility that the French book The Coming Insurrection might be a harbinger of what is to come, Lain sees such a possibility as a hopeful sign. The story in Pick Your Battle revolves around Lain's foraging expeditions in Portland as he gets and then loses a job at a Comcast call center. This is a philosophy book, a memoir, and a radical self-help book for people living during an epoch when the self is under siege. Pick Your Battle is a book that quotes Karl Marx and Carlos Castandea in somewhat unequal measure, a book that hopes to convince even those of us who are stocking up on canned goods and freeze dried ice cream that a radical change to the economic and social order is more likely than total annihilation."Pick Your Battle" was successfully funded through Kickstarter.com on July 13th, 2010.   Read more

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