Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties

By Tariq Ali

One of the world’s best-known radicals relives the early years of the protest movement

What makes a young radical? Reissued to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, Street Fighting Years captures the mood and energy of an era of hope and passion as Tariq Ali tracks the growing significance of the 1960s protest movement, as well as his own formation as a leading political activist.

Through his personal story, he recounts a counter-history of a sixties rocked by the Prague Spring, student protests on the streets of Europe and America, the effects of the Vietnam war, and the aftermath of the revolutionary insurgencies led by Che Guevara. It is a story that takes us from Paris and Prague to Hanoi and Bolivia, encountering along the way Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Henry Kissinger, and Mick Jagger.

This edition includes the famous interview conducted by Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn with John Lennon and Yoko Ono In 1971.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781786636027

Tariq Ali

Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore and was educated at Oxford University, where he was president of the Oxford Union (a position subsequently occupied by Benazir Bhutto). He was a prominent leader of opposition to the war in Vietnam. Today he writes regularly for a range of publications including The Guardian, The Nation and The London Review of Books and is on the editorial board of New Left Review.  He has written more than a dozen books including non-fiction such as Can Pakistan Survive? The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Bush in Babylon and Pirates of the Caribbean, and fiction including Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, The Stone Woman and A Sultan in Palermo, as well scripts for both stage and screen. He lives in London.

Reviews for Street Fighting Years

[johnnebauer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent biography, and candidly while candidly dealing with errors his affection for the period is apparent. A cavalcade of cultural icons flows through it pages, and includes Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Mick Jagger, John Lennon. Re-reading it 20 years after its publication it is poignant and passionate. The disappointment of Perestroika and the euphoria of the anti-Vietnam war movement makes a heady blend of loss and hope. I would be keenly interested in reading the 2005 edition.