The Occupy Wall Street Bible Is Out, and It's Good [View all]

[n2doc]

By JULIE MA
Editorial Intern

It’s probably no accident that the minimalist brown cover of Occupying Wall Street, the new title from OR Books about the now world-famous Manhattan movement, resembles the posters that, for a few months in 2011, came to define Zuccotti Park’s skyline. The title and subtitle—"The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America"—are written in black scrawl, adding extra authenticity to the stylization. It’s not just a book you’re holding, a reader soon realizes, it’s also a mini-protest sign.

Fair warning up front: A little rectangular box on the back cover reads, "All profits from this book will be donated to Occupy Wall Street." If you’re certain you disagree with OWS and don’t want to support their cause, then this book is probably not for you. But if you’re at all interested in how the now-global movement began, there’s probably no better resource than this.

Though Occupying’s author is a collective of roughly 60 unnamed people calling themselves "Writers for the 99%," the book is not a disjointed assortment of individual essays. Rather, and perhaps surprisingly, it acts as a concise historical account that sheds light on the varied and interesting minutia of OWS, covering everything from the guidelines of the General Assembly to the infamous Brooklyn Bridge protest to the drama created by class and racial tensions within the movement. So thorough is Occupying that even the thousands of people who lived in Zuccotti’s tent city themselves last year could probably learn something about the inner workings of the mass they once helped compose, or reinvigorate the fire that brought them there in the first place.

The authors admit at the beginning of Occupying that they could not cover every story that went on in and around Zuccotti during OWS—the days of the protest were too filled with action, and the protesters too numerous. They also warn that in no way should their book be considered an "official statement" from OWS, saying that "claims to formal representation of a horizontal movement such as OWS [are] both inappropriate and impossible." Caveats aside, however, Occupying offers a vivid and worthy start to the eventual OWS canon.
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