I Rise in Fire
Jamil Al-Amin, aka H. Rap Brown, and the Long Revolution
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Pub Date Mar 23 2027 | Archive Date Apr 16 2027
Doubleday Books | Doubleday
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Description
Charting a revolutionary life that reshapes our understanding of the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and what happened to the radicalism of the 1960s, I Rise in Fire tells the captivating story of Jamil Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, a civil rights activist who served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panthers’ Honorary Minister of Justice, and the leader of a major Islamic organization in the 1990s.
From his youth in Louisiana to his dangerous organizing in Alabama to his time in Tanzania on the run from the CIA and the FBI, Rap Brown led a remarkable life of car chases, shootouts, manhunts, and run-ins with the mafia. A household name in the late 1960s and a major reason why rap music is called rap music, Rap Brown should be as well-known as Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton. But he was largely forgotten by the end of the twentieth century. Incarcerated from 2000 until his death in 2025, he suffered a combination of historical erasure and demonization.
Resurfacing the life of this once-iconic figure, I Rise in Fire sheds light on Al-Amin’s key role in the Black Power movement, the protest at the1968 Summer Olympics, his pioneering of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, and his efforts to rid Black neighborhoods of drugs. It also exposes the various government initiatives, from COINTELPRO to counter-terrorism programs, that attempted to curtail him, culminating in his wrongful imprisonment. Drawing on declassified FBI files and a series of exclusive interviews with Jamil Al-Amin, this is a work of rigorous scholarship and rich story telling.
In our time of ever increasing political repression and surveillance, I Rise in Fire is a reminder that the radical politics of the 1960s represented one moment in a much longer struggle for freedom and justice – which continues to this day. The man who once declared “violence is as American as cherry pie” is as relevant as ever.
Advance Praise
“Unforgettable. . . . A masterful work of speculative fiction.”—Chicago Tribune
“Ogawa’s fable echoes the themes of George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own.”—Time
“A masterpiece. . . . A novel that makes us see differently. . . . It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision.”—The Guardian
“A feat of dark imagination . . . an intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance.”—The Wall Street Journal
“[A] masterly novel.”—The New Yorker
“An elegantly spare dystopian fable. . . . It tingles with dread.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Quietly devastating . . . Ogawa finds new ways to express old anxieties about authoritarianism, environmental depredation and humanity’s willingness to be complicit in its own demise.”—The Washington Post
“Timely, provocative reading . . . A harrowing parable about the importance of memory and the profound danger of cultural amnesia.”—Esquire
“One of my favorite novels of the decade. . . . It’s a perfect correction to the overwrought politico-apocalyptic fiction so fashionable in These Times. . . . It clarifies all the things our wired society muddles, especially, and most profoundly, the saving grace of the human touch.”—Hillary Kelly, Vulture
“Profoundly powerful. . . . It has the timelessness of a fable, yet feels like an urgent warning about the need for resistance in a world that seems all too quick to forget the lessons of the past. —The A.V. Club
“A searing, vividly imagined novel by a wildly talented writer . . . Dark and ambitious.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The novel is particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe. Throughout the book, citizens live under police surveillance. Novels are burned. People are detained and interrogated without explanation.”—The New York Times
“Ogawa lays open a hushed defiance against a totalitarian regime by training her prodigious talent on magnifying the efforts of those who persistently but quietly rebel.”—The Japan Times
“Strange, beautiful and affecting.”—The Sunday Times (London)
“The Memory Police truly feels like a portrait of today. To await the future is to disappear the present—which only accelerates the speed with which now turns to then, and then turns to nothing . . . A lovely, if bleak, meditation on faith and creativity—or faith in creativity—in a world that disavows both.”—Wired
“Haunting and imaginative.”—Refinery29
“Ogawa crafts a powerful story about the processing of loss and the importance of memories.”—Annabel Gutterman, Time
“Eerily surreal, Ogawa’s novel takes Orwellian tropes of a surveillance state and makes them markedly her own.”—Thrillist
“A taut, claustrophobic thriller.”—Salon
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Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780385551397 |
| PRICE | $35.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 480 |