The Verso book of dissent : from Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad / preface by Tariq Ali ; edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This volume contains some 400 quotations and excerpts ranging from an Egyptian peasant protesting a noble's seizure of his donkey in ca. 1800 BCE to Henning Mankell, a Swedish mystery writer who participated in the aid flotilla to Gaza that was fatally attacked by the Israeli military (an account of the slave uprising led by the Spartacus and the words of Mohammed al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush in protest of the invasion of Iraq, are included, so the alliterative subtitle is not very misleading). In between, one finds excerpts of poems, stories, songs, pamphlets, speeches, etc. from a broad range of dissenting figures, including a 14th century judge in Palestine satirizing the law, a 15th century Vietnamese aristocrat fighting against the Chinese Ming dynasty, the 16th century French writer François Rabelais, Abigail Adams appealing to her husband John to "remember the ladies" as he worked on "the new code of Laws" for the newly-independent United States, Thomas Paine, French revolutionary Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Russian socialist Alexander Herzen, Sojourner Truth, American anarchist Luci Parsons, Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, African-American poet Langston Hughes, Jean-Paul Sartre, South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, to cite a handful of examples.

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.