by Sanford D. Horwitt
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Product Description
In the course of his flamboyant career as an all-purpose activist, Saul Alinsky went from organizing working-class ethnics in one of Chicago's most blighted neighborhoods to mapping out strategies for the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. He enlisted allies-from Catholic clergymen to labor unionists and black activists-in battles waged against opponents from slumlords to the Eastman Kodak corporation. The range of Alinsky's activities, the intensity of his beliefs, and his exhilarating mixture of crudeness and calculation almost vibrate off the pages of this passionate and inspiring biography.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Saul Alinsky's biography, 2008-10-26
Although I am only about one hundred pages into this book, it has been both and easy and interesting read so far. This sociologist/criminologist experienced Chicago from the late 1920's and I am up to the beginnings of his BYNC (Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council). I bought this book believing this to be the community organization which Alinsky started that was the organization which hired Barack H. Obama after he returns to Chicago from Havard Law School.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Let Them Call Me Rebel, 2008-09-29
This book is required reading for anyone who is interested in understanding what a "community organizer" is and what he does in Chicago. Barack Obama worked for organizations founded by Saul Alinsky and run by his proteges.
Obama never gives details of his community organizing, but this book tells what he would have been doing for his several years in the 1980's in Chicago: teaching people how to boycott, protest and threaten the economically and politically powerful in order to get what they want.
It is a unique training, to say the least, for a Presidential candidate.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
The Best of the Bunch, 2003-11-30
Saul David Alinsky, the subject of this biography, is oft written about but rarely presented without the bias of the writer leaking through. Alinsky's life was, by design, controversial. He maddened, inspired, angered and incited. Who can blame his critics from all sides of the political spectrum from having a last go at it now that he's gone.
That being said, Horwitt's biography presents Alinsky in the clearest and fullest light of any who have undertaken this difficult chronicling. He does not get in the way of the wonderful stories and experiences that made up Alinsky's life. He brings alive Alinsky and the world he helped shape.
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
 Be thou a man, 2000-04-29
Saul Alinsky was a complex and colorful man of great integrity and a civic activist with world-wide influence. Dedicated to empowering the politically weak and unorganized, Alinsky is rightly credited as the founder of community self-help. In this highly readable account, we come to appreciate Alinsky's empathic genius and his flair for showmanship. He had an uncanny personal gift for discerning which acts of protest would get attention and results, as well as an ability to teach others some of the tricks of the trade. Of all the anecdotes in the book, perhaps the most memorable concerns the time that young Alinsky was hauled before his rabbi for socking a kid who had beat up his own best friend. Alinsky excuses his behavior as "eye for an eye", and part of the "American way". His rabbi's answer is memorable. "You think you're a man because you do what everyone else does. Now I want to tell you something the great Rabbi Hillel said: 'Where there are no men, be thou a man.' I want you to remember that." And Alinsky did.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
"Be Thou a Man", 2000-03-29
Saul Alinsky, a complex and colorful man of great integrity and a civic activist with world-wide influence, deserves more than one biography. More than any other person, Alinsky was dedicated to empowering others and is rightly credited as the founding father of community self-help. In this highly readable account, we come to appreciate Alinsky's empathic genius and his flair for showmanship. He had an uncanny personal gift for discerning which acts of protest would get attention and results, as well as an ability to teach others some of the tricks of the trade. Of all the anecdotes in the book, perhaps the most memorable concerns the time that young Alinsky was hauled before his rabbi for socking a kid who had beat up his own best friend. Alinsky excuses his behavior as "eye for an eye" and part of the "American way." His rabbi's response is memorable. "You think you're a man because you do what everybody does. Now I want to tell you something the great Rabbi Hillel said: 'Where there are no men, be thou a man.' I want you to remember that.'" And Alinsky did.
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