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Summary

 

A young draftee named Victor Willard goes AWOL in Germany after an altercation with a commanding officer. Porgy is an African-American GI involved with the international Black Panthers and German radicals. Victor and a female radical named Ana fall in love.  They move into Ana’s room in a squatted building near the US base in Frankfurt. The international campaign to free Black revolutionary Angela Davis is coming to Frankfurt. Porgy and Ana are key organizers and Victor spends his days and nights selling and smoking hashish, while becoming addicted to heroin. Police and narcotics agents are keeping tabs on them all. Politics, love, and drugs. Truths, lies, and rock and roll. All the Sinners Saints is a story of people seeking redemption in a world awash in sin.

 

About the Author

Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (Verso 1997) the novels, Short Order Frame Up, All the Sinners Saints and a collection of essays titled Tripping Through the American Night. He is a frequent contributor to Counterpunch and Dissident Voice. His articles, reviews and essays have appeared in anthologies and numerous print and online journals, including Jungle World Berlin, Monthly Review, The Sri Lanka Guardian, Vermont Times, Alternative Press Review and the Olympia, WA based monthly Works In Progress. He currently lives in Burlington, VT. and works at a library.

 

Talking About History and More with Rob Robertson on his Out of the Blank Podcast

 

Reviews

“All the Sinners Saints, Ron Jacobs' scorching novel, unfolds like a long acid trip through the Vietnam generation, spliced with splendid colors, transcendent music, liberating sexual encounters, young revolutionaries, government paranoids and nightmarish violence. This electrifying book about an unforgettable band of outsiders is one of the best novels about the cultural fallout from the Sixties since Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers."

‍ --Jeffrey St. Clair, author of Born Under a Bad Sky, editor of CounterPunch

 

“This page-turner thriller takes the reader to the heady days of 1970-71, crisscrossing continents from Germany, where the militant leftist Red Army Faction meets U.S. Black Power and soldiers rebel against the endless Vietnam War, while in the United States, Black Panthers are murdered, Angela Davis goes underground, and mostly Black prisoners in Attica take over the prison and are massacred. Ron Jacobs is a master storyteller in the tradition of Don DeLillo, unafraid to create bold and radical characters.”

-Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, author of Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975