You Can't Please All
Memoirs 1980-2024
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A new memoir from renowned political activist and author of Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties
The revolutionary upsurge of 1968-1975 jump-hopped continents with ease but finally petered out. What happened after is the subject of You Can't Please All. Tariq Ali recounts a life committed to writing and cultural interventions. An eyewitness in Moscow to the fall of the Soviet Union, he was caught up in the intellectual excitement that had gripped the country. In Porto Alegre, Hugo Chávez invited him to visit Caracas, and the two men developed a striking friendship.
Post-2001, as a founding member of the Stop the War Coalition, he became a fierce critic of the War on Terror, visiting many US cities with surprising regularity to engage in debate and discussion, inaugurating a new phase of political activism. Evident in his work is the integral part politics plays in his life. He is one of the most sought-after socialist and anti-imperialist public intellectuals on most continents.
Underlying the narrative is a chain of anecdotes, reflections, jottings and storytelling. The book explores his work for the theatre and film, as well as his fiction, including the acclaimed Islam Quintet. There are pen portraits of friends and comrades such as Edward Said, Derek Jarman, Richard Ingrams, Benazir Bhutto, Mary-Kay Wilmers, and the intellectuals who founded and relaunched New Left Review: E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn.
The book also contains a moving family portrait, describing how his parents met and lived during the early years of Pakistan.
About this Author
Tariq Ali has written more than two-dozen books on world history and politics--the most recent of which are The Extreme Centre, The Dilemmas of Lenin and The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan, Winston Churchill--as well as the novels of his Islam Quintet and scripts for the stage and screen. He is a long-standing member of the Editorial Committee of New Left Review and lives in London.
Reviews
"Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist"
--Observer
"Tariq Ali has not lost the passion and vim which made him a symbol of the spirit of '68 ... has not seen fit to join forces with the terminally cynical, or set up a graven god that can be accused of failing"
--Christopher Hitchens
"Vintage Ali: literate rabble-rousing mixed with entertaining sniping, smart aperçus, and endless provocations."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Entertaining, politically engaged ... a superbly bracing world tour."
--Stuart Jeffries, Guardian
"Fascinating reading ... an autobiography that matters."
--Chris Bambery, Counterfire
"Ali can be refreshingly funny, gossipy and personable, just the activist you would want to sit down and have a chat with ... a great new year read."
--Steven Andrew, Morning Star
"A great read ... [Ali] has always got something insightful and interesting to say."
--Dave Kellaway, Anti-Capitalist Resistance
"[A] glimpse of the perils and benefits of being one of the world's best-known left-wing activists and intellectuals"
--Andy Beckett, London Review of Books
"To escape ... with your principles mostly intact, your rage undimmed - that too is a kind of virtue, and its own monument."
--James Robins, Times Literary Supplement
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