Mike Marqusee (/ˈmɑːrkəsi/;[1] 27 January 1953 – 13 January 2015[2]) was an American writer, journalist and political activist in London.
Marqusee's first published work was the essay "Turn Left at Scarsdale", written when he was a sixteen-year-old high school student in New York and included in the 1970 collection "High School Revolutionaries".[3]
"Both in the eloquence of his writing and the deep humanism of his vision, Mike Marqusee stands shoulder to shoulder with the spirits of Isaac Deutscher and Edward Said." – Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz.
Sports writingedit
An ardent sports fan, Marqusee won considerable renown for his work on cricket. War Minus the Shooting, his book on the 1996 Cricket World Cup, has been lauded as a "riveting, revelatory and largely run-free account".[10] Before it was published, wrote Rob Steen, "observations of subcontinental cricket emanating from Britain, and just about every other corner of the so-called old world, tended to be clichéd, wrongheaded, derisive, patronising or just plain racist. Small wonder, then, that it took a London-based American with a rucksack, a notebook and a CLR Jamesian yen for Marxism to supply an overdue corrective."[10]Duncan Campbell of The Guardian wrote that "One of the best books ever written on cricket, Anyone But England, is by an American writer, Mike Marqusee."[11]
Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Inside Kinnock’s Labour Party (co-author with Richard Heffernan) (Verso Books, 1992). ISBN 978-0-86091-561-4
War Minus the Shooting: a journey through South Asia during cricket’s World Cup (Mandarin, 1997). ISBN 978-0-7493-2333-2
Chimes of Freedom: the Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art (The New Press, 2003). ISBN 978-1-56584-825-2
Anyone but England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket (Aurum Press, 2005), ISBN 978-1-84513-084-8
Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (Verso Books, 2005). ISBN 978-1-84467-527-2
Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the Sixties (Seven Stories Press, 2006). ISBN 978-1-58322-686-5.
"Imperial whitewash - feelgood versions of British history are blinding us to the ways in which we are even now repeating it", The Guardian, 31 July 2006[12]
If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Verso, 2008). An extract appeared in The Guardian.[13]
"Why I became British" (The Guardian, 16 February 2010)[14]
"I don't need a war to fight my cancer" (The Guardian, 28 December 2009) [15]
Street Music: Poems (Clissold Books, 2012).
The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer (OR Books, 2014)
"Fifty years of Bob Dylan's stark challenge to liberal complacency" (The Guardian, February 2014).[16]
^Marqusee, Mike (2013). Blake/ Paine In Their Time and Ours. Verso Books. ISBN 978-1844679980.
^Mike Marqusee "Ten years on: a comment on the British SWP", mikemarqusee.co.uk, 10 January 2013
^"Mike Marqusee 1953-2015". Retrieved 13 January 2015.
^ abSteen, Rob. "Cricket minus the cliches: War Minus the Shooting." Cricinfo. 23 August 2008. (accessed December 12, 2008).
^Duncan Campbell "Stumped by curveballs", The Guardian, 19 January 2009
^"Imperial whitewash - feelgood versions of British history are blinding us to the ways in which we are even now repeating it", The Guardian, 31 July 2006.
^"The first time I was called a self-hating Jew", The Guardian, 4 March 2008.
^"Why I became British", The Guardian, 16 February 2010.
^"I don't need a war to fight my cancer", The Guardian, 28 December 2009.
^"Fifty years of Bob Dylan's stark challenge to liberal complacency", The Guardian, February 2014.
External linksedit
Mike Marqusee's homepage
Colin Robinson, Mike Marqusee obituary, The Guardian, 15 January 2015.