Wednesday 22 April 2015

Reefer Madness

 






REEFER MADNESS
TREVOR L. HUGHES
ZEPHYR PUBLICATIONS
1989-1997

Pretty cool 'dope' fanzine from the people at Hawkfrendz, it ran to 11 issues in total, 10 issues for Volume 1 and just the single issue for Volume 2. Features lots of vintage comic strips, cover art and other 'dope' related features, this is well worth picking up if you see it.

Saturday 21 March 2015

Spirit of 69 Skinzine - Issue 3


Spirit of 69
Skinzine

The third issue of this fanzine dedicated to the Spirit of 69 skinheads and it is as good as the previous two issues. Featuring articles on Subba Culture, Laurel Aitken and Sound Men, as well as reviews and news. If you're interested in Skinheads or Skinhead music, this is well worth picking up, if not it's just nice to have a physical zine rather than an online one, go buy it!

Thursday 19 February 2015

Dropout - Martin Yoseloff

"The haunting novel of a girl adrift...and a generation in torment..."a reading experience not to be missed." New York Times


LANCER BOOKS 73-770
NEW YORK, USA
FIRST PRINTING 1968
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY E. P. DUTTON AS "THE GIRL IN THE SPIKE-HEELED SHOES' 1949

"ABSORBING"
-Miami Herald

"Tenderness, understanding and the poetry of simple lives are the keynotes of this novel."
- Oklahoma City Oklahomen

"Martin Yoseloff, with a delicate perceptiveness of the shades of virtue and evil, here takes the old pattern of a small town girl 'with no mother to guide her' falling into questionable associations, keeping poor company, hunting up temptations as if she had not been tempted enough. Nut Mr. Yoseloff alters the old pattern-decidedly for the good."
- Pasadena Star News

"This could be a dull and lustful tale, bur Mr. Yoseloff fills it with so much compassion, and writesnwith such skill, tht one cannot help being fascinated. It has many of the qualities of Stephen Crane's Maggie."
-American Mercury

YOU WILL NEVER FORGET MAYBELLE REARDON!

Wednesday 18 February 2015

Subba Culture Fanzine


Subba Culture 
Fanzine

A new or newish fanzine called "Subba Culture" and if you like the kind of books featured in The Cool World then this will definitely be of interest to you. Full of street stylish fun, fashion, music, film, books and other similar toned stuff. Three issues out already and it is limited to 200 numbered copies per issue, be quick before they go, I wasn't quick enough for issue 1 and I missed out...so if anyone has one, I need a copy! 
If you want a copy, check the link for Subba Culture, they do mail order and if you don't want a copy, check out the site anyway, it's great!

Tuesday 17 February 2015

Come Back On Monday - Sheila Solomon Klass

"A white teacher, a problem student, a week of crisis in a Harlem school"


ABELARD SCHUMAN  
NEW YORK, USA
FIRST PRINTING 1960

This is the story of a week of crisis in a school situated in one of New York's seething slums - the "pit" of Harlem.
Deborah Lieb, a dedicated and devoted teacher, is on the staff of Henry D. Thoreau Girls' Junior High, a school to which incompetent teachers are exiled, in which administrators and much of the staff apathetically serve out their sentences while awaiting transfers, a school where "come back on Monday" is a favorite teachers' dodge to get rid of problem students - most of them Negroes and Puerto Ricans reflecting the fears and angers and tensions of a depressed community.
The crisis arises when Deborah Lieb is accused by a reporter for a Negro tabloid of being anti-Negro. caught by the cyclopean forces let loose by this accusation - the Negro "hate" sheet relentlessly pursuing its racial enemies, and the white school administrators eager to secure advancement by "keeping the lid on" their problem school - Deborah finds her job threatened, her own values and self-assurance weakened. During this same week, she must deal with the problem of Barbara Jones, one of her brightest Negro students and a potential delinquent, haunted by the memory of the drunken bum who violated her in a tenement basement when she was twelve years old. Deborah must also cope with the pettiness and back-biting of some of her colleagues - the old maids, the Negro toadies, the narrow minded disciplinarians who are far more concerned about keeping order i the hallways than about a miscarriage in the classroom.
By skillful use of parallel narration, the author holds the mounting suspense of Deborah's story before us, while introducing an amazing gallery of characters. Teachers, principals, students - all are unforgettably etched for the reader.
Yet if this novel were nothing more than photographic realism, it would fall short of its purpose. For the theme of this book is implicit in its title; there must be time and love for hapless youngsters such as the ones that Deborah and the few responsible teachers befriend. It is this sense of compassion which illumines this engrossing and exciting novel. It is a genuine cry from the heart.

Monday 16 February 2015

The Jungle - Nelson Algren

"A great novel of lawless youth" 

"A book of the hour...close to the raw" -New York Times

AVON BOOKS T-185
NEW YORK, USA
NO DATE 1950's
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK AS BY THE VANGUARD PRESS AS 'SOMEBODY IN BOOTS' 1935

"A powerful and disturbing book, which does not shrink from the harsh facts of violence, rape and human wretchedness."
-New York Sun

"Frank and brutal...violence and transcient, narcotic beauty"
-Washington, D.C., Post

The forthright story of Cass McKay : 
his father, a devil by his own admission-
his brother, an unmanly drunken wreck-
his sister, a gentle girl enslaved by hunger-

-and of that small, restless section of our youth of both sexes, which - in the absence of proper parental supervision - rides the rods that lead to degradation and delinquency.

"This book should be read, reread and studied."
-Washington, D.C., Post

"Sizzling from the griddle of experience"
-New York Times

Sunday 15 February 2015

Satchmo : My Life in New Orleans - Louis Armstrong

"The Colourful Vice-Ridden Days Of New Orleans"


ACE BOOKS 146
LONDON, UK
FIRST PRINTING 1957
FIRST PUBLISHED IN HARDBACK BY PETER DAVIES FEBRUARY 1955

New Orleans - with its savage, joyous struggles for existence; its vigorous, warm personalities, its brutalities, its poignancy. New Orleans, the cradle of jazz and of all-time king of jazz - Louis Armstrong. This is a one-man success story with a difference, for Armstrong came up the hard way, and Satchmo gives us here the whole incredible, vital tingling Armstrong history from the slums of his childhood through reformatory to the time he left his fabulous Mississippi city and headed out trumpeting for Chicago and the world.