Working the Waterfront: The Ups and Downs of a Rebel Longshoreman

An eighty-year-old looks back on his life as a Texas longshoreman and radical labor activist in this "colorful and absorbing" memoir (The Southwestern Historical Quarterly).

Somebody said, "History is written by the winners. The losers have nothing to say." This book is by one of the losers, a bit player, not the star of the drama.

So begins Gilbert Mers in these personal recollections of forty-two years on the Texas waterfront as a longshoreman and radical union activist. But far from ha...