Second edition, November 2019An ever surprising account of a life on the spiritual and political margins. Leslie Evans' parents were occultists, downwardly mobile outcasts from their families, one Christian, the other Jewish. His father, a failed salesman reminiscent of Willie Loman, had also been a professional astrologer who was forever on the lookout for quick roads to enlightenment or a deal that would make him rich, including buying a gold mine in the Arizona mountains. Evans childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s was filled with accounts of the astral plane and of Father Randall, the dead thirteenth century crusader and spirit guide who had been a major figure in his parent's lives.As a teenager under the influence of Colin Wilson's The Outsider Evans set out on a mystic quest, experimented with Peyote, and frequented the Beat coffee houses. In college he formed a student political party with his friend the black nationalist ideologue Ron Karenga, who would later create the holiday Kwanzaa. Following the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 Evans was persuaded by two Jewish refugees from the Nazis to join the Socialist Workers Party, the American followers of the murdered Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Over two decades in that organization he rose to become the managing editor of the Trotskyist Fourth International's English language news service, was editor of the party's theoretical magazine, and coeditor of the definitive edition of Trotsky's writings on China, during which time he became friends with Peng Shu-tse, who had been a central leader of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s.In the 1960s the SWP masterminded anti-Vietnam War demonstrations that brought more protesters to Washington, D.C., than the entire city population. Evans chronicles the party's growth in the mass antiwar movement, then, as the radical wave receded, the party's turn to industrial work during which Evans spent three years on the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota, two of them working as a hard rock miner. Then came the organization's implosion in the early 1980s when younger party leaders turned on the old guard and staked their future on an unsuccessful effort to win influence with Fidel Castro. Evans was close enough to the center of these events to tell much about the inner life of this American Marxist party that the true believers would not tell and that few of the former members were high enough in the organization to witness directly. He goes on to describe his painful rethinking of Marxism. In later years Evans was a researcher at UCLA where he put his training in Chinese to use by heading an Asian book publishing project. He served for two years as production editor of a major report for the World Health Organization documenting the failure to invest in research on the diseases that ravage the third world, and worked as a web journalist for UCLA's International Institute where he covered talks by Mikhail Gorbachev and many other international political figures. He also took time to explore the paranormal world that had so fascinated his parents. In recent years he has been a community activist on the mean streets of South Los Angeles. This second edition, 10 years after first publication, makes numerous small updates and additions in the text and adds a postscript.