A fascinating tale about a radical youth, the 1960s, and the decline of the Socialist Workers Party into a bizarre cult.

The first seven chapters wonderfully capture  Los Angeles and the 1950s and early 1960s youth counterculture there. . . .Evans' memoir has wonderful chapters about Evans' time at Los Angeles City College participating in the civil rights movement and coffee house scene around LACC and then his recruitment into the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party, the dominant U.S.  Trotskyite party and then being a left organizer at UCLA. . . .  These Los Angeles chapters beautifully capture the outsider currents among Los Angeles youth in the 1950s and early 1960s including meeting older radicals from the 1930s.

The heart of this book is Evans' 22 years in the Socialist Workers Party, starting in Los Angeles and then over a decade and half in New York during the SWP's glory years when it was central to mobilizing huge numbers in the anti-Vietnam War marches. . . .

Evans describes a fascinating tale how he was a miner/organizer of SWP; the 12 activists valiantly tried but failed to support miners' union dissidents while their party began expulsions of dissidents to the new party line.  Evans realized that when the miners' faced huge layoffs the SWP on the Iron Range was a failure at doing anything to stop the layoffs. Evans as a dissident was more and more isolated.

Finally he moved back to Los Angeles where he and many others were formally expelled in bizarre trials. . . . Evans, always a  boy from the streets with survival skills, hooks up with an old girlfriend who becomes the love of his life and gets himself into graduate school at UCLA in sociology where he encounters Max Weber and ceased being a Marxist by 1988.

--Julia Stein, the Red Room blog

One Intellectual's Travels On The Left

I highly recommend this book. It chronicles a young intellectual's travels through the Sixties Left, particularly the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. Born of parents, who met at a séance and believed in the occult, he ended up in an increasingly cultic political organization. The dream of a communist future has become the cover for the transformation of the SWP into an organization dedicated to the preservation of its leader Jack Barnes. I had passed through a similar experience in the orbit of British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy.

However Evans had his productive moments, particularly his editing and writing of material on modern China as well as his editing of the journal International Socialist Review and work on a number of books. In fact it appears from Evans' account that it was precisely his intellectual contributions to the movement that brought him into conflict with the supreme leader Jack Barnes.
Evans' memoir and personal experience raises broader issues beyond the narrow confines of the small Trotskyist circles he participated in. First and foremost is the relationship of the Marxist tradition to the development of repressive regimes in the Twentieth Century and its relevance to the Twenty-First Century Left. Another matter he explores in the role of intellectuals within working class organizations.

A must read.

--Tim Wohlforth
(Author of The Prophet's Children, a memoir of his years in the Trotskyist movement,
and a writer of detective fiction.)   

5.0 out of 5 stars. Essential for Understanding Political Sects

Leslie Evans's "Outsider's Reverie" is an indispensable source for students of social movements. The author, a former long-term leader in the Socialist Workers Party, has used his experiences to give us details that have heretofore been lacking about this American Trotskyist grouping. More generally, the book constitutes a valuable document for the understanding of many such organizations, political as well as religious. Students of religious sects, for example, will want to study this work to compare with what is known about groups like the Plymouth Brethren. I found the similarities very striking, especially the lengths to which these sectarians go in what the Germans call "Besserwisserei" (know-it-all), and in the cult of leadership, not to mention mutual back-stabbing. We are indeed indebted to Evans for telling us things that are generally hidden to outsiders.

--Werner Cohn
(Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of British Columbia,
author of Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers)