Goliath

New York: Richard W. Baron, a Sidereal Press book, 1970. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Jim Marshall (Photographs). The format is approximately 5.75 inches by 8.5 inches. vi, 134, [4] pages. The dust jacket has slight wear and soiling. Introduction by Joan Baez Harris. David Victor Harris (February 28, 1946 - February 6, 2023) was an American journalist and activist. After becoming an icon in the movement against the Vietnam War, organizing civil disobedience against military conscription and refusing his own orders to report for military duty, for which he was imprisoned for almost two years, Harris went on to a 50-year career as a distinguished journalist and author, reporting national and international stories. Harris himself was ordered to report for military service in January 1968 and refused. He was indicted and charged with felony "disobedience of a lawful order of induction" and tried in federal court in San Francisco in 1968. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Harris was incarcerated in the Federal Prison System where he spent twenty months before being paroled. After his release on March 15, 1971, Harris continued organizing against the Vietnam War until peace agreements were signed in March 1973. In March 1973, Jann Wenner, the founder and publisher of the magazine Rolling Stone, gave Harris a tryout with the magazine. The result marked the beginning of his more than 40-year career as a national and international magazine journalist. In 1978, Harris signed a contributing editor contract with the New York Times Magazine, where he worked for the next decade. After his stint with The Times, Harris concentrated on writing books, publishing eleven. Derived from a Kirkus review: Men imprisoned for their principles have often turned to the power of the pen to serve their missions while serving time. David Harris, a Resistance activist in his first year of a three-year sentence for refusing to cooperate with the draft, takes on the American nation-state (Goliath) and all it symbolizes, offering an opposing vision of life, love, and the pursuit of happiness through nonviolent revolution. But Harris' manifesto is probably too abstract to make many converts. The brunt of his message is conveyed in little analytical-philosophical pieces on subjects like being a man, the process of doing, politics and the common life, reality, existence, fear, the meaning of America, its myths of power, property, enemy, and weapon, the forces of life and death, and the Revolution. These moralistic tracts are balanced by short sequences in which Harris exercises his powers of description on the look and feel of American life: the city of Chicago, the character of Los Angeles, overheard conversation on Vietnam, a disturbing dream, a close friend on the run, a country church revival meeting, a prison rebellion, laborers in the field, and children at school, etc., etc.--the salt of the earth and the sickness of the state. Harris repeatedly foreshadows and finally describes his own trial, but essentially this is a pretty impersonal story. "The book is really about you and me," writes wife Joan Baez in her introduction, "and what we must do to keep from being crushed by Goliath, and then what we must build in place of it."