Spitting in the Wind

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This poorly edited, disorganized autobiography is an unsatisfying amalgam of significant revelations about the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party in the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1960s and early '70s and trivial information about the author's troubles with women and drugs. A graduate of the University of Southern California and a one-time law student, Anthony was the first black middle-class convert to the Panthers' cause, and was an intimate of Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. He also served as an informant for the FBI--blackmailed into that role, he claims, by two FBI agents who falsely charged Anthony with a bombing, put a gun to his head, then cut a deal to let him off the hook in exchange for the inside story on the Panthers. Here he tells in detail how government agents apparently infiltrated black liberation organizations, fomented enmity from within and thus, he claims, caused many murders, even killing some blacks and serving as drug wholesalers to black leaders to undermine the movement. In his 1970 book Picking Up the Gun, Anthony suppressed much of the material he relates here. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)

Library Journal

In this bizarre memoir former Black Panther Anthony discusses his years as a member of that militant group and an informant for the FBI. Admitting that his first book on the Panthers, Picking Up the Gun ( LJ 2/1/70), was not ``all that honest,'' he rambles on here about the infrastructure of the party; his ambiguous relationship with the FBI; his involvement in the Pan-African movement, the CIA, the Mafia, and drug trafficking; his drug and alcohol problems, which he blames for his habitual abuse of women. Excessive name-dropping and extensive descriptions of the author's sexual encounters and wardrobe do not enhance the work's coherence or credibility; this wide-ranging confessional definitively exceeds the boundaries of believability when Anthony claims the FBI substituted LSD for the ``sex stamina pills'' he ordered from Penthouse magazine. This is a very strange account of a turbulent time in American history, but given current interest in the 1960s, there may be some demand for it.-- John Turner, New York