Media Opportunity

Corrected & Updated - For Immediate Release For Immediate Release

WHAT: A celebration of the release of From Ike to Mao and beyond, My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, a Memoir by Bob Avakian

WHEN: Wednesday, May 25, 2005, 7 p.m. (6:00 p.m. reception)

WHERE: Los Angeles Central Library, Mark Taper Auditorium, 630 W. 5^th St., Los Angeles

Free and Open to the Public

CONTACT: 323-492-8529

The Los Angeles Central Library, Social Science Department and Friends of Insight Press will host an evening of readings, performance and commentary by authors, artists and academics in celebration of the release of:

From Ike to Mao and beyond, My Journey from Mainstream America to

Revolutionary Communist, a Memoir by Bob Avakian.

A growing list of participants includes Reg E. Gaines (playwright, poet and author – Bring In Da Noise Bring In The Funk), Lucia Marano (actor – A&E’s 100 Centre Street), Raymond Lotta (author of America In Decline and editor of And Mao Makes Five), Dr. Juan Gomez-Quinones (professor of history at UCLA and author of The Roots of Chicano Politics 1600-1940 and Chicano Politics 1940-1990), Carol Downer (co-founder of Feminist Women’s Health Centers and author of A New View of a Woman’s Body), Barry Sanders (professor, Pitzer College) and Francis D. Adams (authors of The Exclusion of African-Americans in a White Man’s Land, 1619-2000), Paul Von Blum (senior lecturer of African-American Studies and Communications at UCLA and author of Resistance, Dignity and Pride: African-American Artists in Los Angeles), Jerry Quickley, poet and radio host on KPFK FM, and Martha Quetzal Ceja (managing editor of Insight Press, Inc., former MEChA chair and co-author of The Chicano Struggle and Proletarian Revolution in the U.S.)

Bob Avakian has written a memoir containing three unique but interwoven stories. The first tells of a white middle-class kid growing up in 50’s America who goes to an integrated high school and has his world turned upside down; the second of a young man who overcomes a near-fatal disease and jumps with both feet into the heady swirl of Berkeley in the 60’s; and the third of a radical activist who matures into a tempered revolutionary communist leader. If you think about the past or if you urgently care about the future…if you want to hear a unique voice of utter realism and deep humanity…and you dare to have your assumptions challenged and your stereotypes overturned…then you won’t want to miss this book.

Bob Avakian is the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S.A. And he is more than that: he’s an innovative and critical thinker who has taken Marxism to a new place; he’s a provocative commentator on everything from basketball to religion, doo-wop music to science; and he’s a pit-bull fighter against oppression who’s kept both his solemn sense of purpose and his irrepressible sense of humor.

Review copies of From Ike To Mao and beyond, My Journey From Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist are available upon request. Contact:

Insight Press, 70A. Greenwich Ave. #117, NY, NY 10011 www.insight-press.com

Los Angeles Friends of Insight Press, 323-492-8529 momentousimpact@onebox.com

What People Are Saying About:

From Ike To Mao and beyond, My Journey From Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist

“Bob Avakian has devoted his life to the one ideology that he believes holds the promise of massively releasing human freedom and dignity. The ideology is communism. Berkeley-bred Avakian’s new memoir – “From Ike to Mao and Beyond” leaves a breathtaking impression. Having deepened and purified his convictions over 40 years of personal and political struggle, Avakian sounds a high, sustained cry for complete transformation almost as if he were the trumpet of Lenin himself.”

Rick DelVecchio, San Francisco Chronicle, April 29, 2005

“Bob Avakian is a long distance runner in the freedom struggle against imperialism, racism and capitalism. His voice and witness are indispensable in our efforts to enhance the wretched of the earth. And his powerful story of commitment is timely”

Cornel West, Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion, Princeton University

“A truly interesting account of Bob Avakian’s life, a humanizing portrait of someone who is often seen only as a hard-line revolutionary. I can understand why Bob Avakian has drawn so many ardent supporters. He speaks to people’s alienation from a warlike and capitalist society, and holds out the possibility for radical change.”

Howard Zinn, Author, A People’s History of the United States

“From Ike to Mao and Beyond is the memoir of a long distance runner whose disillusionment with imperialism, racism and capitalism led him from his mainstream American background to embrace the ideals of revolutionary communism. In the mid-1980’s he dared to write a book with the provocative title, ‘Democracy, Can’t We Do Better Than That?’ Now, well after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he critically analyzes the flaws of modern democracy – flaws that divide society into classes and allow the upper classes to wield disproportionate power – and questions the blind refutation of a more egalitarian socialist system. A window into transparent injustice and one person’s true-life determination to search for a better path, despite the scorn of the society around him.”

James A. Cox, Editor in Chief of Midwest Book Review

Full text of these and other reviews and statements can be found at www.insight-press.com.