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Glad to find I was wrong! The central thesis of the book is basically this: if it weren't for the "bad" people of society, the ones who insisted on fighting all day and fucking all night, who refused to work, who rejected society's demand for pro-social conformity, we would all enjoy a lot fewer personal freedoms. From the multi-racial bawdy houses of Philadelphia from which numerous prostitutes would have solicited the attentions of our nation's founders to the rebellious drag queens and butch dykes who rejected the assimilationism of the unsuccessful "homophile" movement of the 1950s and 60s in favor of rioting and throwing bricks at cops, Russell pays tribute to the layabouts, the lazybones, the drug dealers and rum runners, the "bad n*s", and the deviants whose refusal to bend to society's will laid the groundwork for the success of more "respectable" organizers and reformers who followed in their turbulent wake.

Any anarchist who's interested in American history should read this book. Also, it would be excellent to pair it with Nell Painter's "The Invention of Whiteness," since Painter's book about the origins of the social category of "white" is broad and abstract, and "A Renegade History" has several chapters where Russell discusses, in a detailed manner, the transition from racialized to white of the Irish, Italians, and Jewish people.

Beatrice Sparks was evil incarnate.

I picked this book to read after reading Go Ask Alice last year and then learning that it was fake and not even based on a real person's diary at all. Sparks just completely fabricated it to try to discourage drug use in teens. It brought up the interesting point that there is no official labeling system for books and it's ultimately left up for the authors and publishers to decide, so Alice was labeled as nonfiction even though it was completely falsified. Another example of this is A Million Little Pieces, which was titled and advertised as a memoir until someone happened to realize that at least one portion of his story was not possible and everything tumbled down after that.

After reading Go Ask Alice and finding out the truth, this book happened to pop up on a random search through catalogues for books I wanted to try to read this year. I had no idea how deep everything would run. I saw the title and chuckled to myself a little because it seemed like such an odd thing to be tying so many topics together. But it all does tie together. Go Ask Alice was used to fuel the war on drugs. Spark's other big hit, Jay's Journal, was used to spiral everyone into the Satanic Panic.

For Jay's Journal, Sparks was given a real diary from a grieving parent who's son committed suicide. She wanted her son, Alden Barrett, to be able to help other teens work through issues and hoped his death would prevent others from allowing themselves to spiral so horribly. The problem was, Sparks added a whole lot of fabrication to the journal before publishing it to make it seem like Alden (aka Jay) was into witchcraft and satanism and that's what caused him to kill himself in a ritualistic manner. The worst part is that when Sparks left in some of the actual journal entries, she didn't remove the information that would have made it easy for people to figure out the town that the "journal" came from and circle it back to the poor family that was still grieving the loss. The worst thing is that when people decided to look into the authenticity of Jay's Journal, not a single person spoke to his parents to find out if it had happened and instead just relied on whatever Sparks responded with.

Emerson did a really good job at explaining the parallel lines that connected these "journals" to the war on drugs and satanic panic. If you've ever wondered about what helped to fuel these "wars", this is definitely a good one to pick up. This book had way more than I expected and just kept shocking me with the information. Do recommend.