Book Review: Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams

Ten years ago, Austin anarchist scott crow’s ‘emergency heart’ sped at the sight of a flooded New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At the invitation of Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther residing in the most devastated area, crow helped form the Common Ground Collective to provide relief aid. No charitable effort, the group’s actions screamed solidarity instead. The government proved to be a failure, stranding Black people, especially in the lower ninth ward, while the body count piled up with the levees breached. The chaos allowed for Common Ground to become what crow described as the “largest anarchist-inspired organization in modern U.S. history.” The experience is recounted in full by crow’s Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective, considered a contemporary classic of anarchist literature. He follows it up with a new book just out this year that surveys his updated radical thought through a series of documented interviews and conversations between 2010 – 2015. Published and beautifully bounded by GTK Press, a Cleveland-based cooperative, Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams: A scott crow Reader speaks on everything from worker cooperatives, alternatives to police, media, and, of course, reflections on the Common Ground Collective in New Orleans.

Read more on my latest CounterPunch article:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/11/the-emergency-heart-of-anarchism/