REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE

by Huey P. & J. Herman Blake Newton ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1973

Rather surprisingly, this is a very personal memoir, with little political reflection. Newton, who was born in Louisiana and grew up in Oakland, California, describes the tough, brave, hardworking father who named him after Huey Long, and the ""loving discipline"" of his home. The Oakland ghetto was already in a state of depression during Newton's school years, and he barely learned to read until he worked through Plato at the end of high school. Years of petty crime were combined with law studies and a growing sense that no black organization was reaching ""the brothers on the block"" or fulfilling Malcolm X's promise. After surviving a jail sentence in the unspeakable ""hole"" of solitary, Newton helped start the Black Panther Party in 1966, using self-defense patrols as a recruiting device. There is little organizational history here, though -- just a few swipes at the egoism and lack of seriousness of ex-comrade Eldridge Cleaver. Nor is there a defined strategy for the Panthers' future: Newton vaguely alludes to cooperation with other ""ethnic"" groupings, a retreat from the classwide socialist approach the Panthers sometimes express; the book doesn't even push ""community survival programs"" -- the Panthers' latest effort to achieve a grass-roots base -- but hints that they will continue to work with black churches. In his recurrent comments on philosophy, Newton plays with Nietzsche, Che, and a Maoist ideology of ""direct experience,"" ending up with an explicit existentialism and pragmatism that again seems a retreat from the earlier theory of revolutionary practice -- ""Revolutionary suicide"" is a leap into the void, a deliberate ""foolishness,"" verging on helpless nihilism. And the book itself, for all its narrative power, seems suspended between the confidence of the past and the uncertainty of the future.

Pub Date: April 1, 1973

ISBN: 0143105329

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION