Read more
A decade of American society coming apart.Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles—Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion—alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis. Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground. On the streets in 2014, from the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, among other scenes that Shanahan accessed not as a credentialed observer but an active participant: prisoner, infiltrator, activist. The resulting essays outline the pitfalls and opportunities facing those seeking to reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world.
List of contents
Introduction, by Andy Gittlitz
Part 1: Rupture
1. The Old Mole Breaks Concrete
2. Some Bullshit
3. Noel Ignatiev, 1940–2019
Part 2: The Rock
4. Checking Out
5. Days Spent Doing Too Much of Fucking Nothing
6. The Secret Lives of Rikers Island Jail Guards
7. The Surreality of Rikers Island
Part 3: Morbid Symptoms
8. Death to the Walking Dead
9. Friday the 1312
10. Zoomers Go to Hell
11. Hybrid Moments
12. The Future Belongs to the Mad
Part 4: Looking Right
13. Three Months Inside Alt-Right New York
14. Thankful for President Trump: Thanksgiving with Stop the Steal
15. The Big Takeover
16. Iowa Bluffs
Part 5: Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help
17. Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help
Afterword: Toward Something Else
About the author
Jarrod Shanahan is the author of
Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage (Verso, 2022); coauthor of
States of Incarceration (Field Notes, 2022),
City Time (NYU Press, 2025), and
Skyscraper Jails (Haymarket, 2025); and editor of
Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity, a Noel Ignatiev reader(Verso, 2022). He works as an assistant professor of criminal justice at Governors State University.
