Davis, A. Y. (1988). Angela Davis—An autobiography. International Publishers.Angela Davis (born January 26, 1944) is a feminist political activist, American Marxist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad.A memoir, this book, first written in the 1970s when Angela Davis was 28, describes and analyzes the events of the late 1960s and 1970s. She covers her upbringing, education, friends and associates, her decision to join the Communist Party, her teaching and firing at university, her arrest and her trial. Davis offers a firsthand glimpse of US social movements and political activism, women's role and treatment, and the lived experience of incarceration. Davis asserted she was "devoted to the quest for activist solutions to the immediate practical problems posed by the Black liberation movement and for appropriate responses to the repressions emanating from the adversarial forces in that drama." This book provides a unique insight into the shaping and formative experiences of her intellectual life, beliefs, and direction. For example, while attending Elisabeth Irwin High School in NYC, she learned about socialism and first read The Communist Manifesto. She was invited by a friend to attend meetings of a youth organization called Advance where she met Herbert Aptheker, a respected Communist historian, and his daughter, Bettina. While attending Brandeis University, she studied existentialists, attended a Communist youth rally in Europe, and returned home where she was interrogated by the FBI. After reading Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse, she sought out Marcuse for a reading list on philosophy. He encouraged her to do doctoral work in Frankfurt, Germany. Meanwhile, the Black Panthers emerged within the US to the point, she decided that she could no longer remain in Germany, so she returned to the US. Marcuse agreed to supervise her doctoral studies at the University of California in San Diego. She described how while helping to organize a rally in San Diego, she was criticized for "doing a man's job." The Black male assumed that women should not "play leadership roles," instead their role was to "inspire" her man and educate his children." Women were generally seen as a "threat to [Black men's] attainment of manhood." A persistent theme in her memoir included detailed descriptions of prison life and treatment of female prisoners, a theme that became a focus of her life. While in prison, she observed, "A new consciousness had taken root. It was not simply the consciousness of those who were in prison for political reasons. This was a mass phenomenon. Prisoners - particularly Black prisoners - were beginning to think about how they got there - what forced them into prison. They were beginning to understand the nature of racism and class bias. They were beginning to recognize that regardless of their specific details of their individual cases, most of them were in prison because they were Black, Brown, and poor." This book offers a unique vantage point from which to explore a woman's experience of developing an intellectual viewpoint, social movements in of the 1960s and 1970s, prison treatment, race and class.