A great book, highly recommended. Loosely based on the activities of the Angry Brigade in the late 60s and early 70s it is a superb and highly convincing account of how a small group of activists become more and more cut off from reality, more and more mutually dependent and mutually destructive and how sexual tension and sexual politics drive even more extreme action. It would be easy to deal in charicatures but Kunzru draws...
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I just finished Kunzru's brilliant novel last night, and recommend it highly. I think that I'm about the same age as the author, and so I missed out on the Angry Brigade years, but I was a part of the eighties incarnation of the same ridiculous revolutionary impulse -- lived in squats in Brixton and the Lower East Side, and did plenty of foolish things, although nothing as violent as his protagonists, for which I am now devoutly...
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Mike Frame's story begins innocently enough: his wife, Miranda, has organized a 50th birthday party, their troubled relationship shaky due to lapsed communication and Mike's dreadful secret. A secret he realizes is about to be exposed when a familiar face from the past arrives on his doorstep. Mike Frame has erected a documented identity, but Mike is really Chris Carver, a 1960s London revolutionary with a violent past. Now...
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If you are interested in the sociological development of militant protest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hari Kunzru's research into the Revolution in order to create this novel will supply much detail and speculation worthy of your consideration. Much of my generation's opinion of this period was shaped by television news and popular music, and much that I have read on the period has depended on the media's importance...
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I was quite enthralled with this book, mostly since it really appears that Hari Kunzru has done his homework. He really paints a vibrant picture of the era of a sixties revolutionary hell bent on change. You can picture every row house brick in the burroughs, and the cramped in meetings of the characters he picks up along the way. The best success is the feelings he gives to the reader in wanting to know what really makes...
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