Eis' personal, on-site recollections are so evocative you can almost smell the tear-gas. Eis filched the photo from the prosecutor's file at the end of his trial for protesting in a 'tumultuous manner.')īetween the pages of this thick autobiography you'll rub shoulders with folks like David Harris, Joan Baez, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, and Luis Valdez while revisiting a slew of progressive battlegrounds-including the police-state confrontations that arose around the Student Strike at SF State, the Fresno Draft Resistance Movement, and the Battle for People's Park.

(Here's a bit of an 'inside joke.' If you take a close look at the book's cover photo showing Eis being arrested, you can spot a stamp mark in the lower right corner that reads: 'Property of Fresno Police Dept. There's so much history on tap here that Eis' book contains 10 Sections and 48 chapters-from 'Jew Boy' to 'Billy Clubs, Not Books,' to 'Going to Court, Fresno County Jail' to 'David Harris at Vets Against the War.' The book also features more than 60 pages of photographs and documents from Eis' extensive memoir. Reading 'Hard Rain' is like listening to the guy across the table from you at the local bar. Eis has done it with accessible clarity and an unflagging supply of chatty commentary.

Imagine if everybody who lived a full and rambunctious life invested the time it would take to chronicle their adventures. 'Hard Rain' is a compelling read-a 421-page rap sheet that is recounts bruising adventures in street-level politics while rhapsodizing about the curative powers of resistance-from campus protests, to anti-draft activity, to political theatre. Like the widely traveled Eis, this book covers a lot of ground-beginning with his childhood in a New York family rooted in local labor struggles and left-wing politics and recording the cross-country adventures that lead to coming-of-age struggles on the campuses of the Bay Area and in the fields of the state's oppressed farmworker communities. This exceptional book documents Eis' hard-rockin' life as a Sixties Radical (who is still a radical in his '70s).

Eis has published three books on the intersection of theatre and politics and is also the proprietor of the Rebound Bookstore in San Rafael.Įis has now published an autobiography called 'Standin' in a Hard Rain' (the title pays homage to Bob Dylan's ferocious ballad, 'A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall). Like San Francisco poet Laurence Ferlinghetti, he is both an author and the owner of a bookstore.

Books by eldridge cleaver