The Years of Grief and Laughter

In January of 1970, when he was in the hospital following a severe heart attack, the late Ammon Hennacy (1893-1970), one of the principal fathers of the present-day radical movement, made three requests of his second wife, Joan Thomas, should he die:she was to finish with the publishing of the book he had written,The One-Man Revolution in America,she was to scatter his ashes on the graves of the Haymarket martyrs at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago; and she was to write his biography.The result of her fulfilling her husband’s third request is not so much a biography (although it is that, too), but rather an intimate and delightful, albeit at times painful, memoir of an offbeat marriage where the husband was forty-one years older than his wife. The book is, as Ms. Thomas puts its, a “continuation of the fun-thing we had going between us, whatever that means.” Well, whatever Ms. Thomas means, the reader will discover along with the “fun-thing” a deep psychological insight into a man who, with complete fearlessness, was dedicated to pacifism and Christian anarchy to the point of laying down his life for his friends without equivocation