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Publisher's Press Release on Outsider's Reverie
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- Created on Saturday, 06 March 2010 19:23
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BORYANABOOKS ANNOUNCES PUBLICATION OF OUTSIDER'S REVERIE by LESLIE EVANS
Outsider's Reverie: A Memoir by Leslie Evans
488 pp, trade paperback, $18.95
30 pages of photographs, index
Available from Amazon.com
An ever surprising account of a life on the spiritual and political margins. Leslie Evans' parents were occultists, downwardly mobile outcasts from their families, one Christian, the other Jewish. His father, a failed salesman reminiscent of Willie Loman, had also been a professional astrologer who was forever on the lookout for quick roads to enlightenment or a deal that would make him rich, including buying a gold mine in the Arizona mountains. Evans childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s was filled with accounts of the astral plane and of Father Randall, the dead thirteenth century crusader and spirit guide who had been a major figure in his parent's lives.
As a teenager under the influence of Colin Wilson's The Outsider Evans set out on a mystic quest, experimented with Peyote, and frequented the Beat coffee houses. In college he formed a student political party with his friend the black nationalist ideologue Ron Karenga, who would later create the holiday Kwanzaa. Following the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 Evans was persuaded by two Jewish refugees from the Nazis to join the Socialist Workers Party, the American followers of the murdered Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Over two decades in that organization he rose to become the managing editor of the Trotskyist Fourth International's English language news service, was editor of the party's theoretical magazine, and coeditor of the definitive edition of Trotsky's writings on China, during which time he became friends with Peng Shu-tse, who had been a central leader of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s.
In the 1960s the SWP masterminded anti-Vietnam War demonstrations that brought more protesters to Washington, D.C., than the entire city population. Evans chronicles the party's growth in the mass antiwar movement, then, as the radical wave receded, the party's turn to industrial work during which Evans spent three years on the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota, two of them working as a hard rock miner. Then came the organization's implosion in the early 1980s when younger party leaders turned on the old guard and staked their future on an unsuccessful effort to win influence with Fidel Castro. Evans was close enough to the center of these events to tell much about the inner life of this American Marxist party that the true believers would not tell and that few of the former members were high enough in the organization to witness directly. He goes on to describe his painful rethinking of Marxism.
In later years Evans was a researcher at UCLA where he put his training in Chinese to use by heading an Asian book publishing project. He served for two years as production editor of a major report for the World Health Organization documenting the failure to invest in research on the diseases that ravage the third world, and worked as a web journalist for UCLA's International Institute where he covered talks by Mikhail Gorbachev and many other international political figures. He also took time to explore the paranormal world that had so fascinated his parents. In recent years he has been a community activist on the mean streets of South Los Angeles.
About the Author
Leslie Evans was born in New York City in 1942 into a family absorbed by spiritualism and the occult. Raised in Los Angeles he read widely in the literature of literary outsiders, frequented the coffee houses of the late fifties, and took an active part in the civil rights movement sparked by the Freedom Rides and lunch counter sit-ins. In 1961 he joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, where he was active in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and then for twelve years on the organization's professional staff in New York City, during and massive anti-Vietnam War movement in which this organization played a key part.
While in New York he served for four years as Managing Editor of World Outlook (later, Intercontinental Press), the weekly news service of the Trotskyist Fourth International. For another four years he was e ditor of the International Socialist Review, the party's monthly journal.
From 1979 to 1982 Evans lived in Virginia, Minnesota, where he worked in an industrial electric motor repair shop and was on the labor crew in the iron mines and a member of the Steelworkers Union.
Returning to Los Angeles, he did graduate work in sociology at UCLA. Beginning in 1986 he worked as a staff research associate and editor at UCLA's Center for Pacific Rim Studies; was production editor for six years of Chinese Science, annual journal of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine; and was program officer for the university's Asia-Pacific Institute.
A high point of that period was two years in Geneva and Los Angeles as production editor of a major World Health Organization report documenting the failure to invest in research on the diseases that ravage the third world. He also has served as an editor for studies by the World Bank.
From 2001 to 2005 Evans was website and publications manager for UCLA's International Institute, where as their web journalist he covered talks by Mikhail Gorbachev, John Kerry, Warren Christopher, Edward Said, Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, General Anthony Zinni, Shimon Peres, and former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda.
Evans is the author of China After Mao (1978) and editor of some ten other books, including the standard library edition of Leon Trotsky's writings on China.
In 1988 Leslie Evans and his wife Jennifer Charnofsky moved to the predominately black and Latino West Adams section of South Los Angeles near USC, where they restored a 1910 Craftsman home that became a city Historic Cultural Monument. Evans has been deeply involved as an activist in his community, during the gang wars of the early 1990s and up to the present, serving on the board of one of the city's volunteer neighborhood councils and several other community organizations.