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Roomanitarian
In Roomanitarian, popular author, actor, musician, and spoken-word artist Henry Rollins returns to the combative prose that has won him critical acclaim and a legion of devoted fans. The book is divided into three The first section, "Walking the Chasm,” written in the form of a poem, epitomizes Rollins’s beautifully stark, hard-hitting style. The second part, "Ended," is a series of short prose pieces reminiscent of Solipsist. Finally, the biting humor and social commentary Rollins is renowned for is on full display in "To Ann Hitler with Love," a series of mock love letters to a fictional woman who bears a striking resemblance to conservative pundit Ann Coulter.
- GenresNonfictionPoetry
160 pages, Paperback
First published October 27, 2005
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549 people want to read
About the author
Henry Rollins
107 books1,731 followersHenry Rollins (born Henry Lawrence Garfield; often referred to simply as Rollins) is an American singer-songwriter, spoken word artist, author, actor and publisher.
After joining the short-lived Washington, D.C. band State of Alert in 1980, Rollins fronted the Californian hardcore punk band Black Flag from 1981 until 1986. Following the band's breakup, Rollins soon established the record label and publishing company 2.13.61 to release his spoken word albums, as well as forming the Rollins Band, which toured with a number of lineups until 2003 and during 2006.
Since Black Flag, Rollins has embarked on projects covering a variety of media. He has hosted numerous radio shows, such as The Henry Rollins Show and Harmony In My Head, and television shows, such as MTV's 120 Minutes and Jackass, along with roles in several films. Rollins has also campaigned for human rights in the United States, promoting gay rights in particular, and tours overseas with the United Service Organizations to entertain American troops.
After joining the short-lived Washington, D.C. band State of Alert in 1980, Rollins fronted the Californian hardcore punk band Black Flag from 1981 until 1986. Following the band's breakup, Rollins soon established the record label and publishing company 2.13.61 to release his spoken word albums, as well as forming the Rollins Band, which toured with a number of lineups until 2003 and during 2006.
Since Black Flag, Rollins has embarked on projects covering a variety of media. He has hosted numerous radio shows, such as The Henry Rollins Show and Harmony In My Head, and television shows, such as MTV's 120 Minutes and Jackass, along with roles in several films. Rollins has also campaigned for human rights in the United States, promoting gay rights in particular, and tours overseas with the United Service Organizations to entertain American troops.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
August 21, 2015
I should preface this by noting that I’ve been a fan of Rollins since I heard my first Black Flag album in the 1980s. I especially liked his spoken-word material, and I started reading his books in the early 90s when Tower Records started carrying them. It’s safe to say he was instrumental in getting me through my college years. I haven't read him for awhile now, and reading this book from 2005, it’s striking how much my outlook has changed, while Rollins is essentially still Rollins – unfiltered and unedited free-form negative prose that taps into the deepest darkest feelings of hate, loathing and loneliness we all harbor inside, with a healthy dose of ironic juvenile macho sex banter. Which is my way of saying I had a hard time getting into this – much of it doesn’t really resonate with me at 49 as it did when I was 24. Even the more focused politically-oriented material – including his fake love affair with Ann Coulter and his general hatred of the Bush II admin and everything it represented – is too over-the-top for me at times. Still, there’s some good stuff here that reminds me why his writing meant so much to me 25 years ago. Also, it’s fair to say that even back then, some of his stuff (Solipsist comes to mind) was too heavy for me. So while I’m only giving it two stars, that says more about me than it does about Rollins.
November 16, 2007
"I would give you the map to where all the landmines on my property are."
I can find the page with that quote in my rapidly becoming Dog Earred copy of this book, without even looking.
The size of this tome is aesthetically pleasing, as is cover art. The title? A take from Kafka. LOVE IT.
That quote single handedly sums up my love for Hank's writing. It's the most romantic thing I've ever read, yet gut wrenchingly painful...when you consider that from the perspective of the person saying that line...why did they have to put up those landmines in the first place?
Sure. That's a wee bit overly analytical, and a digression from the point of this review. What is my point? GO BUY THIS BOOK. Go to 21369 publications website, and order it now.
I can find the page with that quote in my rapidly becoming Dog Earred copy of this book, without even looking.
The size of this tome is aesthetically pleasing, as is cover art. The title? A take from Kafka. LOVE IT.
That quote single handedly sums up my love for Hank's writing. It's the most romantic thing I've ever read, yet gut wrenchingly painful...when you consider that from the perspective of the person saying that line...why did they have to put up those landmines in the first place?
Sure. That's a wee bit overly analytical, and a digression from the point of this review. What is my point? GO BUY THIS BOOK. Go to 21369 publications website, and order it now.
December 15, 2009
depressing and absolutely hilarious; Rollins is a genius and does not dissapoint one bit.
October 13, 2010
Satirical and dark and many-faced. My copy is dogeared all the way through pin-pointing my favorite tales. One story, about a spot of ever-growing black nothingness growing in the closet, is some of the most melancholy words I've read. Think empty streets under buzzing wires on a hot summer night.
September 3, 2008
Very mediocre for a Rollins book. I grew really bored at some parts, and I almost wanted this book to end.
But, the Ann Coulter chapter is probably one of the best things Rollins has written, and it left me laughing.
But, the Ann Coulter chapter is probably one of the best things Rollins has written, and it left me laughing.
January 27, 2026
Henry Rollins’s Roomanitarian is a compact blast of the author’s characteristic electricity: part essay collection, part personal manifesto, and entirely tuned to the register of a voice that has been honed on stages, bus trips, and the small, unforgiving hours of hotel rooms. First published by Rollins’s own 2.13.61 press in 2005, the book runs roughly 160 pages and collects the muscular, combative prose that many readers have come to expect from him.
At its best, the book reads as a concentrated study in endurance and attention. Rollins is famously a chronicler of travel and of the punk/DIY life—he writes as someone who has been shaped by motion and by constraint—and here those energies are corralled into essays that are equal parts sermon and field report. The book sits squarely within the texture of his oeuvre: a blend of travel/gig journals, meditative rants, and short-form lyric-prose that resists easy categorization. That placement in his bibliography helps explain the readerly expectations the book both meets and subverts.
Formally, Rollins favours a rhetoric of truncation and emphasis: short, declarative sentences that land like punches, sudden anecdotes that swerve into aphorism, and a confessional habit that turns outward into social critique. The effect is theatrical without feeling staged—read aloud, many passages gain aural momentum, the cadence of a performer who has learned to fill silence with urgency. This is not an observational, detached essayism; it is a prose that is emotionally and morally invested. It makes claims, accuses, apologizes, and sometimes performs small acts of self-exposure. Those acts are not designed to solicit pity so much as to demonstrate endurance. The book’s recurring leitmotif—doing the work, surviving the day, keeping sentinel over the small things that constitute a life—comes through again and again.
Consider a passage that encapsulates the book’s ethical stance: “My main goal is to stay alive. To keep fooling myself into hanging around. To keep getting up every day.” The bluntness of that sentence—its near-clinical admission of precariousness—reveals the spine of Rollins’s writing here: honesty as act, honesty as performance. He is at once austere and plaintive; his temper is often frustrated, but it is a frustration generated by care rather than cynicism.
Thematically, Roomanitarian orbits around solitude, discipline, and the aesthetics of small rebellions. Hotel rooms and transient spaces become metaphors for interior life: temporary, functional, and revealing. In this liminal geography, Rollins examines the thin places where conviction either hardens into stoicism or withers into complacency. He is preoccupied with what might be called ethical fidelity—how to remain honest to one’s own limits and obligations in a culture that rewards spectacle and ease. These essays are less interested in producing systematic theory than in staging a persistent interrogation of how a life gets lived, moment to moment. The result is a set of fragments that together assemble a rough credo. (This is consonant with how readers and reviewers have broadly classified his books—as hybrid forms that mix diary, rant, and cultural commentary.)
As a literary object, the book is not without its limits. Its rhetorical mode—intensity over subtlety, declamation over dispassionate nuance—will alienate readers who prefer balanced exposition or structural finesse. At times the text circulates within its own register of outrage and resolve, risking echo chamber effects: a few riffs feel repeated rather than deepened. Yet those very repetitions are also part of Rollins’s signature: insistence as method. For readers attuned to mood, velocity, and moral heat, the repetitions read as insistence; for others they might read as immaturity of argument.
What it ultimately offers, and what makes it worthy of critical attention, is the way it transforms the ordinary—hotel rooms, odd routines, transient friendships—into loci for sustained ethical questioning. It is a book best approached not for argumentative rigour but for rhetorical truthfulness: a text where personality and principle are braided, where performance is a form of conviction. In that sense it functions as a useful corrective to more domesticated, professionalized forms of contemporary memoir and cultural criticism. For students of prose who want to see how voice can be weaponized and tenderized in equal measure, Rollins provides a study in sustained affect.
Recommendation: read Roomanitarian if you value prose that refuses the comfort of neutrality and instead presses youthful ferocity into disciplined reflection. If you come seeking a tidy thesis or a systematic cultural history, look elsewhere; but if you want a muscular, sometimes raw example of how an author translates life’s small urgencies into sustained writing practice, Rollins delivers.
At its best, the book reads as a concentrated study in endurance and attention. Rollins is famously a chronicler of travel and of the punk/DIY life—he writes as someone who has been shaped by motion and by constraint—and here those energies are corralled into essays that are equal parts sermon and field report. The book sits squarely within the texture of his oeuvre: a blend of travel/gig journals, meditative rants, and short-form lyric-prose that resists easy categorization. That placement in his bibliography helps explain the readerly expectations the book both meets and subverts.
Formally, Rollins favours a rhetoric of truncation and emphasis: short, declarative sentences that land like punches, sudden anecdotes that swerve into aphorism, and a confessional habit that turns outward into social critique. The effect is theatrical without feeling staged—read aloud, many passages gain aural momentum, the cadence of a performer who has learned to fill silence with urgency. This is not an observational, detached essayism; it is a prose that is emotionally and morally invested. It makes claims, accuses, apologizes, and sometimes performs small acts of self-exposure. Those acts are not designed to solicit pity so much as to demonstrate endurance. The book’s recurring leitmotif—doing the work, surviving the day, keeping sentinel over the small things that constitute a life—comes through again and again.
Consider a passage that encapsulates the book’s ethical stance: “My main goal is to stay alive. To keep fooling myself into hanging around. To keep getting up every day.” The bluntness of that sentence—its near-clinical admission of precariousness—reveals the spine of Rollins’s writing here: honesty as act, honesty as performance. He is at once austere and plaintive; his temper is often frustrated, but it is a frustration generated by care rather than cynicism.
Thematically, Roomanitarian orbits around solitude, discipline, and the aesthetics of small rebellions. Hotel rooms and transient spaces become metaphors for interior life: temporary, functional, and revealing. In this liminal geography, Rollins examines the thin places where conviction either hardens into stoicism or withers into complacency. He is preoccupied with what might be called ethical fidelity—how to remain honest to one’s own limits and obligations in a culture that rewards spectacle and ease. These essays are less interested in producing systematic theory than in staging a persistent interrogation of how a life gets lived, moment to moment. The result is a set of fragments that together assemble a rough credo. (This is consonant with how readers and reviewers have broadly classified his books—as hybrid forms that mix diary, rant, and cultural commentary.)
As a literary object, the book is not without its limits. Its rhetorical mode—intensity over subtlety, declamation over dispassionate nuance—will alienate readers who prefer balanced exposition or structural finesse. At times the text circulates within its own register of outrage and resolve, risking echo chamber effects: a few riffs feel repeated rather than deepened. Yet those very repetitions are also part of Rollins’s signature: insistence as method. For readers attuned to mood, velocity, and moral heat, the repetitions read as insistence; for others they might read as immaturity of argument.
What it ultimately offers, and what makes it worthy of critical attention, is the way it transforms the ordinary—hotel rooms, odd routines, transient friendships—into loci for sustained ethical questioning. It is a book best approached not for argumentative rigour but for rhetorical truthfulness: a text where personality and principle are braided, where performance is a form of conviction. In that sense it functions as a useful corrective to more domesticated, professionalized forms of contemporary memoir and cultural criticism. For students of prose who want to see how voice can be weaponized and tenderized in equal measure, Rollins provides a study in sustained affect.
Recommendation: read Roomanitarian if you value prose that refuses the comfort of neutrality and instead presses youthful ferocity into disciplined reflection. If you come seeking a tidy thesis or a systematic cultural history, look elsewhere; but if you want a muscular, sometimes raw example of how an author translates life’s small urgencies into sustained writing practice, Rollins delivers.
February 10, 2019
All born dislocated amidst great distraction. But nothing keeps you from yourself for too long. In the heart of night when men quietly sweep the floors of empty dancehalls and the lonely walk back to silent rooms. There is no shore. When isolation turns you into the only one. And you become inescapable. And no words can be employed to explain or rationalize. And something inside you endlessly suffocates. Dies continuously. Starves and convulses. There is no shore. When someone’s touch becomes narcotic. But provides no relief. Or gets you off. Or out of your mind. There is no shore. If I knew a name to call out, I would. Even though I know I am mute. And if there was a name to call. A cage of fleshed ribs to claw and hold onto. Mutually desperate arms to embrace me. A hot mouth on mine. It would not be relief or the end of panic. But only a temporary resting place. But the annihilating vacuum of constant life would be there to remind me. There is no shore. Two people in a darkened room. Two respirating carcasses imagining other carcasses. Each miles away in thought. No shore. People take years decorating the blank space. Addiction. Marriage. Children. They spend their lives working. Buying things to fill the space. But the more you put in the more you see. There is no shore. Drive faster. Make more noise. Tell yourself you’re in love. Desperation’s never ending mirage. Churches are built. Pyramids are left in deserts. Wars are fought. There is no shore. Future generations will struggle. With ever decreasing resources. They will read about the past with amazement and disbelief. They will wonder if their ancestors ever found it. After so much decimation. Conquering and culture erasing purges to clear all the sightlines and quiet the air. They will see. Those who came before them ripped the world to shreds and shook it apart yet huddled together in fear. Turned on each other in distrust. Ran wild intoxicated by ignorance. Found the voices of the evil and the righteous came from the same mouth. And no leader or prophet was able to lead them to the shore. In sleep I turn and grind my teeth. I know the truth but fight it. In waking hours I turn my head from the blank space and the past and wait for the night. For empty streets to walk lonely upon. Small rooms and solitude. For wind that rustles tree branches. For amnesia and darkness. There is no shore
April 19, 2020
Damn. This was a read.
Ended, Walking the Chasm, and Song of the Solipsist deserve 5 stars. Ended was a bizarre set of fictional vignettes that sparked the entire range of emotion. Walking the Chasm and Song of the Solipsist were well very solipsistic. Very dark and deep journeys into the soul and I waver on how much I think this is fiction versus memoir. The writing in these is wonderful and sharp and heartbreaking. I regularly wanted to stop to write out a quote and then realized it would essentially be the entire page. I've re-read chunks of these already and I think I will return.
To Ann Hitler with Love and Letters to Whitey I liked less. Largely because I don't think they aged well. It's hard for satire to be at all timeless. Ann Coulter is essentially irrelevant (so the ending to the piece was apt) and rage at the Bush administration seems tired now. Both contained chunks of genius hard-biting criticism towards their subjects but I think both pieces were too long and contained tasteless material that weaken the point (Laura Bush, Lynne Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice as lesbian lovers because Bush isn't man enough? Those whole bits are so very very cringe-y). As well as containing sections of internet speak and chat room dialogue that is odious to read online let alone that which is written specifically to be so. I generally both stories would have landed very differently when this work was published.
"For now, I am a scream on pause".
Ended, Walking the Chasm, and Song of the Solipsist deserve 5 stars. Ended was a bizarre set of fictional vignettes that sparked the entire range of emotion. Walking the Chasm and Song of the Solipsist were well very solipsistic. Very dark and deep journeys into the soul and I waver on how much I think this is fiction versus memoir. The writing in these is wonderful and sharp and heartbreaking. I regularly wanted to stop to write out a quote and then realized it would essentially be the entire page. I've re-read chunks of these already and I think I will return.
To Ann Hitler with Love and Letters to Whitey I liked less. Largely because I don't think they aged well. It's hard for satire to be at all timeless. Ann Coulter is essentially irrelevant (so the ending to the piece was apt) and rage at the Bush administration seems tired now. Both contained chunks of genius hard-biting criticism towards their subjects but I think both pieces were too long and contained tasteless material that weaken the point (Laura Bush, Lynne Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice as lesbian lovers because Bush isn't man enough? Those whole bits are so very very cringe-y). As well as containing sections of internet speak and chat room dialogue that is odious to read online let alone that which is written specifically to be so. I generally both stories would have landed very differently when this work was published.
"For now, I am a scream on pause".
December 6, 2020
Not Henry's best work, I've worked through a lot of his work and this one I've least enjoyed. It is a worthy addition to his work as some parts are humorous but some seem to go on. The redeeming part is the closing chapter "The song of solipsist" in which Henry drops his usual all guns blazing aggro-ranting freeform style of writing about what irks him and shows he can bear his soul to write prose about lost love, loneliness and the ineptness of being the human he is. I would recommend if you are a first time reader to get "Black Coffee Blues" or "Solipsist" to really appreciate his work, as they are the most accessible. This one is strictly only for the diehards.
July 24, 2019
Dark and insightful.
October 24, 2019
A lot of the thoughts and feelings going on in here are very familiar. Not sure if that’s comforting or not.
‘To Ann Hitler With Love’ is fucking hilarious tho. Had a good laugh at that.
‘To Ann Hitler With Love’ is fucking hilarious tho. Had a good laugh at that.
February 7, 2025
A great book, though hard to find now. I really enjoyed it in my early 20's, many years back.
January 8, 2016
Eu gosto pra caralho do Henry Rollins. Acho o trampo dele foda no Black Flag, acho o trampo dele foda como autor e acho o trampo dele ok no spoken word. Resolvi tentar a literatura dele.
Não é um livro ruim. É bem parecido com o Family Man do Black Flag. Cada trecho é um microconto cheio de ironia criticando a sociedade ocidental, a polícia, liberais americamos, o racismo dentro de todo mundo, o homem branco e outros temas que todo mundo fala mal. O que se difere aqui é que ele manja pra caralho das ironias e se inclui numa auto-flagelação junto com a sociedade inteira. É um niilismo divertido que te prende pelas cento e poucas páginas.
O problema do livro é que ele se divide em 5 partes: 1- microcontos; 2- contos; 3- relato de uma experiência de um blog que ele manteve ativo provocando uma colunista de algo que eu entedi que é a Veja americana; 4- mais microcontos; 5- mini ensaios. Essas 5 partes conversam muito pouco entre si. Fica difícil entender o raciocínio editorial em manter isso tudo no mesmo livro. Se recortassem os dois capítulos do meio funcionaria bem melhor.
Recomendo para: fãs do henry rollins, gente que gosta de black flag, sucidias, liberais e democratas.
Não é um livro ruim. É bem parecido com o Family Man do Black Flag. Cada trecho é um microconto cheio de ironia criticando a sociedade ocidental, a polícia, liberais americamos, o racismo dentro de todo mundo, o homem branco e outros temas que todo mundo fala mal. O que se difere aqui é que ele manja pra caralho das ironias e se inclui numa auto-flagelação junto com a sociedade inteira. É um niilismo divertido que te prende pelas cento e poucas páginas.
O problema do livro é que ele se divide em 5 partes: 1- microcontos; 2- contos; 3- relato de uma experiência de um blog que ele manteve ativo provocando uma colunista de algo que eu entedi que é a Veja americana; 4- mais microcontos; 5- mini ensaios. Essas 5 partes conversam muito pouco entre si. Fica difícil entender o raciocínio editorial em manter isso tudo no mesmo livro. Se recortassem os dois capítulos do meio funcionaria bem melhor.
Recomendo para: fãs do henry rollins, gente que gosta de black flag, sucidias, liberais e democratas.
October 11, 2008
I always thought Hank was this tough guy who never thinks about offing himself, and I still think he's gonna hang in there till the flesh falls from the bone. But reading his violent imagery and hopelessness with the self-serving nature of humans, you can see that in some ways he no longer wants to be here with us, and wants to leave whatever is decent on this Earth in his writing. He really voices a lot of feelings I have day in and day out, but am afraid to express for fear of alienating my loved ones (or in Rollins speak: "loved ones"). Rollins may not stack up there with a Dostoevsky or what have you, but this contemporary, rock-and-roll take on life really is more my speed, honestly. Every Rollins book I've read is uncompromising fist-pumping testosterone, and there's something to be admired in that. And if you're not into morbid odes to the eventual demise, you'll really dig this book for his love odes to Ann Coulter. He doesn't try to call himself a comedian, but in this case, I think Rollins has never been funnier.
July 17, 2011
I'm not quite sure how to review this book, because it's a very mixed experience. Parts of it put me off completely (the violently and disgusting and very f-cked up parts) and part of it I loved (the beautiful prose, personal, but sane, tone of voice parts). I had to skip the 'to ann hitler with love' and 'letters to whitey' because they were just pointless, boring and somewhat disgusting. Rollins can be brutal and ironical, and I like that, when it doesn't get out of hand and becomes too vulgar or violent. Like the short story, if that's what it really is, on page 11-13. -quote to come-.It's just hilarious and I loved it. At other times Rollins put sadness, loneliness and a glint of hope into beautiful and felt prose. That is when I like him, and when I think he's great. All the surreal and violent b-llshit, in my opinion thoug, could(should be?) skipped, or at least maybe separated into different books, to make his less schizoprenich readers, more able to choose, and well, avoid it.
December 21, 2012
Parts of this book I REALLY enjoyed, and parts of it I couldn't get into or found repetitive. Henry does a lot of hating in this book, and there's only so much hate I want to expose myself to in a sitting. Overall, the book was alright. I'm glad he put whatever he wanted to into the book. THAT is refreshing, regardless of how good the content is.
"I understand the people who stay in abusive relationships and wear their bruises proudly. Sad, mean brutal cycle. After awhile, if you want it bad enough, if you really need it--anything will feel like love" (27).
"I understand the people who stay in abusive relationships and wear their bruises proudly. Sad, mean brutal cycle. After awhile, if you want it bad enough, if you really need it--anything will feel like love" (27).
May 24, 2010
It's taken about five attempts to read this, but the effort has paid off. It's not your typical narrative - but snippets of prose, ramblings and vicious daydreams. Rollins has a way with words - which leaves you feeling like you've been punched in the mouth. Think of it as a portal into his mind, which informs his spoken word, his radio and TV work, and his music.
March 19, 2010
This was another of Rollins' more... freeform offerings, somewhat in the vein of "See a Grown Man Cry," and sadly, I am not smart enough to understand it/enjoy it. I read a large chunk of it, but don't feel as though I got anything out of it.
Read
July 14, 2013I couldn't get through it. Just too dark and dreary for me. I think if I was 15-20 years younger I would've liked it.
Want to read
June 21, 2009Roomanitarian by Henry Rollins (2005)
August 5, 2011
definitely liked the book, but can see how, as a written work, might turn people away. learn the man first, then see if his written work can pull you further in.
June 28, 2013
Once again, Henry Rollins surprises me yet again with another mind blowing book... this is, in my book, a very talented man
April 8, 2014
I love the way he thinks, its funny and is my new favorite thing :)
January 26, 2016
Powerful words about the Iraq war and Dubya. I think my favorite work by Rollins is still Black Coffee Blues though.
July 24, 2021
The point when Rollins starts to become an insufferable liberal douche.
January 14, 2012
Painful to read. Love him, hated this.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews