The Lost Traveller’s Dream: A Memoir

The influential author of White Racism: A Psychohistory; The Age of Desire; History and Spirit; Red Hunting in the Promised Land; The Enemy of Nature and the controversial Overcoming Zionism, among others, offers a memoir of his first 80 years, from his early Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn, New York, his Yale and Columbia medical training, his years as a psychiatrist, Reichian psychoanalyst and subsequent academic career, to his embracing of Marxist political economy and commitment to radical ecosocialism. Highlights include his 1998 Green Party candidacy for the US Senate, his campaign in 2000 for the Green nomination for President of the United States, his work with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and his recent Christian spiritual conversion.

"Bringing together radical spirituality, Marxist socialism and an ecological cosmovision, Joel Kovel is an unrepentant fighter against the Enemy of Nature and of Humanity: Capitalism. By his thought and action, he is a pioneer of the ecosocialist international movement."–Michael Löwy

"The Lost Traveller's Dream is a moving and unforgettable account of a personal, political and spiritual journey. Even more significantly, it is the author's profound and personal expression of the age-old song of freedom, the redemption song, that we so desperately need at this moment in history. Kovel presents us with an engaging account of his life as a student, seeker, physician, radical psychoanalyst, teacher, scholar, writer, heterodox marxist, engaged revolutionary theorist, and Blakean Christian mystic. At its deepest level, his story reveals the eternal dialectic between our constraining conditions of life as they are given in personal, familial and social reality, and a powerful, transformative and liberatory force, a force that some call spirit, that is striving to emerge in the midst of things. In Kovel s version of this song of freedom, we are shown how a profound but fleeting revelation in youth finds concrete social and material affirmation in the communities of liberation and solidarity of revolutionary Nicaragua, and how this leads to a lifelong and dedicated struggle to realize the deepest truths of history and spirit in personal and communal reality, here and now."–John Clark

"Combine Sir Toby Belch's cakes and ale with Holden Caufield's ruthless criticism of everything phony. Knead it with the discipline of Thomas Merton's quests for The Human One. Liberally salt it with Mel Brooks and then radically pepper it with a pinch of blithe Brooklyn sass, and you will have made a cake from the manna of an authentic prophet. Joel Kovel has recorded a pilgrim's progress for this millennium, full of joie de vivre and anti-capitalist grace, mirth, and music. With steel-tipped boots called Freud and Marx he kicks ass against the Beast, and with ballet slippers he dances around, through, and out of Academia. He walks shoulder to shoulder with the compas in Nicaragua, California, Palestine, south Africa, Cuba, and Turtle Island. his soul is hammered out by William Blake upon the anvil of the world where it is washed with tears and buoyed by laughter. This is a righteous dialectical Yalie, a brilliant shrink, a stalwart comrade, a non-Jewish Jew, a Green presidential candidate, a gentle prof, and a Marxist Christian meek and bold. Here he remembers it all through that holy membrane that permits interfluence between words and deeds or ideas and actions. He is accompanied by the one who will use that which is not to bring to nought that which is. Call it revolution, or with him call it ecosocialism! Whatever. The lost traveller can bring us home!"– Peter Linebaugh