Announcement!

First, I must apologize to the readers of this blog for the substantial period of silence. I realized many months ago that the time I was putting in to this blog was time I could be spending researching and writing the book project that this site spawned, so I temporarily ceased posting new material here.

Shortly after making that decision, my elderly mother's lung cancer advanced and she became quite ill. I realized for my own well-being I needed to put my own personal priorities on hold. I put this project away and even quit working for a few months, while focusing on my mother's health and its ramifications for my own life. She passed away in March of 2018 at the age of 85. She had a long and full life, teaching me a lot including the importance of standing for something. I realized I needed to spend the rest of 2018 getting my head right and prioritizing my mourning, so I continued to delay finishing my draft.

A few months into 2019 I was finally able to return to work on my draft. I am happy to announce that just this week I have completed a first draft of my manuscript. It's quite hefty, at 150-thousand words including almost 900 source notes. I will reserve my working title for now, but I have described it as a "documentary history" of the Ethiopian revolutionary left, 1969-1979. It has a narrative by me, but is largely based on extensive citations from original documents and eyewitness testimonies. I'm very excited by it, excited and proud.

Its audience is initially the American/European far left, reintroducing them to a subject that they largely got wrong at the time. Since I am not Ethiopian, I hesitate to put myself in the role of someone teaching Ethiopian people their own history, but I have brought my decades of experience in the organized socialist left to bear in exploring the ideological debates in the Ethiopian left, and in that regard I am confident that I have brought something to the table. I hope Ethiopian readers will find something of interest in it, and that my representations have not strayed from recognizable truth.

First things first, I will now be shopping my manuscript to a suitable publisher. I will post any news of any resolution to that quest here. If you are a publisher who might be interested in reviewing my manuscript, leave a comment with your contact info marked "Not for publication" and I will see it and respond. (Comment moderation is on so nothing becomes public without my permission.)

Meanwhile, I hope to occasionally resume posting here, albeit probably on an irregular basis.
—ISH