Murdered by Capitalism

John Ross
June 2004     ISBN: 1560255781

E.B. Schnaubelt, the brother of the infamous Rudolph "Haymarket" Schnaubelt, navigates us through the seemingly boundless revolutionary battleground of his life, uttering cries of subversive defiance from beyond the grave that are duly recorded by the local FBI snoop. Schnaubelt's co-stars in this extravaganza are such long-dead radical luminaries as Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Sacco and Vanzetti and the Haymarket martyrs.

John Ross's own deviant story--West Village red diaper baby, beat poet, Bay Area revolutionary, globe-trotting troublemaker, hobo journalist, jazz-loving junkie, jailbird, "the Willie Loman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation"--plays contemporary counterpoint to Schnaubelt's old-time tall stories as he meanders through the past six decades of American resistance.

John Ross never takes himself too seriously, and his most remarkable trait may well be the honesty with which he approaches life, even while seeking to deconstruct his own faults, imperfections and personal tragedies. Ross concludes this phantasmagoric voyage with a trip to Baghdad to become a "Human Shield"--needless to say, he is bounced from the country by Saddam for demanding to defend Babylon.

Murdered by Capitalism is a unique fusion of personal memoir and lively history, a kind of Night of the Living Dead of the American left--the sort of Dia de Los Muertes fandango at which Che Guevara, Thelonious Monk, William Burroughs, Billie Holiday and Subcomandante Marcos would feel right at home.

"It is a ripsnorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gateways of our national narrative."

--Thomas Pynchon

"A hilarious way to learn the true down-home history of the American Left's heroic past. Bravo to John Ross!"

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

John Ross is the author of the acclaimed memoir Murdered by Capitalism, which was praised by Thomas Pynchon and chosen as a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year. Based in Mexico City for the last two decades, Ross's reporting has appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Nation, Texas Observer, and Counterpunch, to name a few. He is the winner of an Upton Sinclair Award and an American Book Award. His books include Rebellion from the Roots, The Annexation of Mexico and the novel Tonatiuh's People.