344 pages
33 b&w photos
More Than Things is a collection of essays on a variety of political, cultural, and literary issues, all linked by Margaret Randall’s attention to power: its use, misuse, and impact on how we live our lives. There are texts on sex, fashion, food, LGBT rights, automobiles, forgiving, women’s self-image, writing, books, and more. Two of the essays provide glimpses into present-day Cuba and Tunisia. She reflects on her family; her romantic partners; and the revolutionaries, writers, artists, and activists she has known personally and admired: Roque Dalton, Meridel LeSueur, and Haydée Santamaría.
Randall’s writings move in unexpected directions, evoked by the “things” and ideas in her life: objects picked up around the world, her children’s names, family heirlooms, artistic practices, dreams, poems, and memories. Elegantly weaving together the personal and the political, More Than Things is a tour de force by one of America’s most formidable and elegiac writers and political activists.
“Margaret Randall is one of our cherished veteran mavericks and an intellectual of global consequence. With astonishing courage and self-criticality Randall has sought ‘to restore language twisted by our sociopolitical systems’ in order to provide for us ‘a dignity that documents and empowers.’ . . . More Than Things recounts a commitment to art and to the examined life as a quest for knowledge produced from the shockwaves of history.”—Roberto Tejada, author of Full Foreground and National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment
“With this amazing collection of memory and celebration, we can all benefit from Margaret Randall’s brilliant, courageous, and redefining life of activism and keen observation. Everyone interested in our ongoing journey for women’s rights, peace and poetry, justice and freedom, dignity and human rights for all will rush to read and gift this important, galvanizing book.”—Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of The Declassified Eisenhower and the Eleanor Roosevelt volumes
