by Kate Evans, Edited by Paul Buhle
Verso Books
11/03/2015, paperback
SKU: 9781784780999
A graphic novel of the dramatic life and death of German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg
A giant of the political left, Rosa Luxemburg is one of the foremost minds in the canon of revolutionary socialist thought. But she was much more than just a thinker. She made herself heard in a world inimical to the voices of strong-willed women. She overcame physical infirmity and the prejudice she faced as a Jew to become an active revolutionary whose philosophy enriched every corner of an incredibly productive and creative life--her many friendships, her sexual intimacies, and her love of science, nature and art.
Always opposed to the First World War, when others on the German left were swept up on a tide of nationalism, she was imprisoned and murdered in 1919 fighting for a revolution she knew to be doomed.
In this beautifully drawn work of graphic biography, writer and artist Kate Evans has opened up her subject's intellectual world to a new audience, grounding Luxemburg's ideas in the realities of an inspirational and deeply affecting life.
Reviews:
"A courageous leader of the early twentieth-century socialist movement--a woman who dared to question both Marx and Lenin--Luxemburg was also, as Kate Evans reveals in this brilliant graphic biography, a person of deep passions, ecstatic insights, and ultimately, as fascism emerged from the ruins of World War I--heartbreak of historic dimensions. This book is hard to put down and contains a challenge that is impossible to turn away from: We could create a better world--peaceful, egalitarian, even joyful--if we are willing to learn from Red Rosa." --Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Living with a Wild God
"Red Rosa is a wonderfully composed and lively book. The story it tells is compelling, inspirational and fundamentally human. Instructional in its politics and discussions of economics, Red Rosa is also at turns humorous, romantic, and emotional. The decision to write this work in the graphic novel form was a brilliant one; if there is a biography whose multiple dimensions requires more than words to tell it, Rosa Luxembourg's is such a biography." --Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch
"We need more political cartoonists like Kate Evans. She is an artist who lives her art and a radical who lives her politics ... she can write about revolution, not as a historical object, but as a real, relevant, living thing, because Kate is herself a revolutionary." --Seth Tobocman, author and artist of Disaster and Resistance
About the Contributors:
Kate Evans is a cartoonist, artist, and activist. She is the author of numerous books and zines including Bump: How to Make, Grow and Birth a Baby and Funny Weather: Everything You Didn't Want to Know about Climate Change but Probably Should Find Out.
Paul Buhle, formerly a Senior Lecturer at Brown University, produces radical comics and is a recipient of an Eisner Award, the comics industry's Oscars. He founded the SDS journal Radical Americaand the archive Oral History of the American Left and, with Mari Jo Buhle, is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left. He lives in Madison.