Dumbo Books of Brooklyn: Davie Town Council

Friday, April 2, 2010

HORSING AROUND IN POLITICS by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's Horsing Around in Politics is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 143-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

In these alternatingly hilarious and earnest memoirs, satirist and political activist Richard Grayson recounts moments in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s on the campaign trail and the political barricades.

There are reports from the police riot of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the takeover of the party by Grayson's young peaceniks four years later in Miami Beach; scenes from the New York headquarters of the October 1969 Moratorium, a nationwide general strike to protest the war in Vietnam; accounts of the first Earth Day celebration in Brooklyn, with a bike-riding Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and a rock band dressed as pigs singing about pollution, and later the same year, a now-historic 1970 "Women's Lib" action to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of female suffrage featuring feminist icons Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug.

Grayson also reports on his own political mischief-making: getting 26% of the 1982 vote for a seat on the Town Council in Davie, Florida, running on a platform of giving horses the right to vote; creating a political scandal involving Florida lawmakers in "Legislators in Love," and the wacky press coverage in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, People Magazine, and many news outlets of Grayson's joke candidacy for President in 1984, when he famously picked as his running mate the star of TV's "Falcon Crest," the actress Jane Wyman, because of "her experience in dumping Ronald Reagan."