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Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms
A decade of American society coming apart.
Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles—Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion—alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis. Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground. On the streets in 2014, from the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, among other scenes that Shanahan accessed not as a credentialed observer but an active prisoner, infiltrator, activist. The resulting essays outline the pitfalls and opportunities facing those seeking to reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world.
Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles—Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion—alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis. Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground. On the streets in 2014, from the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, among other scenes that Shanahan accessed not as a credentialed observer but an active prisoner, infiltrator, activist. The resulting essays outline the pitfalls and opportunities facing those seeking to reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world.
313 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 2, 2025
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About the author
Jarrod Shanahan
7 books9 followersJarrod Shanahan is a writer, activist, and educator based in Chicago. He works as an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University in University Park, Illinois, and is the coauthor of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and the Future of America’s Punishment System; a co-editor of Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity, a Noel Ignatiev reader; and an editor of Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life.
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November 1, 2025
The good thing about a book of essays is that you can read as few or as many of the essays as you want, but I read them all, and with each one I was glad to have read it.
This is a retrospective spanning Occupy, BLM, Trumpism, the George Floyd rebellion, labor organizing, prison abolition, and a little cultural criticism thrown in, as a treat.
Spoiler alert: we gotta keep going.
This is a retrospective spanning Occupy, BLM, Trumpism, the George Floyd rebellion, labor organizing, prison abolition, and a little cultural criticism thrown in, as a treat.
Spoiler alert: we gotta keep going.
Displaying 1 of 1 review