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Book Review: One Sheaf, One Vine:
Racially Conscious White Americans Talk about Race
by Rich Brooks
24 June 2004
[Robert S. Griffin, 2004, 162 pp.]
Let the corn be all one sheaf --
and the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
by bitter bread and wine.
From The Stranger by Rudyard Kipling
Robert S. Griffin is the University of Vermont professor who wrote The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds, a biographical work based on his interviews with William Pierce and first published on the internet in 2000. I don't like to sit for hours staring at the computer screen to read a book, but in this instance I downloaded and read over 400 pages of pdf-formatted type. That's how strongly I was under the spell of Dr. Pierce at the time and eager to learn all I could about him and his philosophy. Griffin spent several weeks at the National Alliance compound in West Virginia and allowed Dr. Pierce to explain himself in his own words. He refrained from injecting his personal opinions into the biography and presented Pierce's nationalist views essentially without editorial comment. For taking even this "neutral" stance on his biographical subject, however, Dr. Griffin was unable to have this book printed by any major publisher. We know, of course, that jews dominate the book publishing business as they do the rest of the media, so this should have come as no surprise.
Griffin has now written a new book, One Sheaf, One Vine, that employs many of the same interviewing techniques he used in Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds. The "Sheaf Book," as the author calls it, is a series of interviews or "conversations" with 16 racially conscious White Americans who are, as was Pierce, allowed to tell their own stories in their own words. A full chapter of 8-12 pages is devoted to each speaker. As Griffin describes these interviewees on the back cover of his book:
The men and women you will meet in this book aren't public figures or leaders of organizations. They are everyday people: a postal worker from Philadelphia, a college student from Texas, an attorney from New York City, a bookstore owner from Washington State, an appliance repairman from Connecticut, a teacher from Chicago, and so on.
We have a negative very negative image of racially conscious and committed whites, gained largely from the media: neo-Nazi bigots, menacing skinheads, thugs who commit hate crimes. We are informed about people of this sort, but we don't hear from them. They aren't on television news shows speaking for themselves. They don't make movies or publish books. Politicians don't articulate their perspective or advocate their positions. Journalists and intellectuals don't write about them unless it is to belittle them. Schools make no attempt to deal with them objectively.
In this book you'll hear from them. The words in this book are the speakers' as they spoke them; they haven't been altered, softened, or censored. And more than come to know their thoughts on race, you'll meet these people as human beings. Some of them you won't soon forget.
No I won't forget some of them, so poignant and touching are their stories. The book is dedicated to Denis Ruiz, a 50-year old computer programmer who first inspired Griffin to write this book. Ruiz speaks of being "displaced" from his boyhood home in semi-rural New Jersey by the influx of non-Whites, and longs to find a place where he can build a home he will be able eventually to leave to his daughter. He would like to literally turn the clock back by moving to a place like his boyhood home. His story is personal, and not rancorous in any way, but he eventually comes to the same conclusions about race as those of us who are more ideological. Griffin has a short introductory paragraph heading each chapter, and notes that Ruiz has just recently learned he has non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a form of cancer. I suspected from these words and the book's dedication to Ruiz that Denis is no longer with us, but we aren't told of his death until the end of the chapter. I literally shed tears as when I read that, something I don't commonly do. I hope I haven't spoiled the emotional impact on potential readers by revealing this chapter ending.
This is a diverse group of racists (I prefer the term to the esoteric "racialist") in age, gender, education, religion and marital status, but they do share the one common bond of love for our people and our history and our civilization. Most of them grew up in homes without "bigotry" or "prejudice" and came to racial awareness only through the hard and sad experience of seeing how non-Whites were destroying their world. If there's another common thread running throughout this book, it's that racism is caused by contact with these alien groups and knowledge of their dysfunctional ways, not ignorance. Even so, there is very little "hate" directed against any group -- even jews -- by any of these racists. It is not an excuse or a clich when these people say they love their race and should be permitted to do so just as all other races are permitted and even encouraged to do so.
VNN's Alex Linder and Rob Freeman (aka "Kievsky") each have chapters devoted to them. Two other names I recognized were folksinger Eric Owens and American Renaissance writer Mike Rienzi, but the most other 12 have apparently never been racial activists of any sort. In fact many of them are not identified by their real names and most are intensely private people. Typical is the family in rural New Hampshire who are homeschooling their four children and successfully rearing them without TV and other jewsmedia influence. These people don't want "White Power," but only to be left alone and to live among their own kind.
There are also varying degrees of jew-consciousness expressed by the Griffin 16. Linder, as you would expect, is very articulate and specific about naming the root source of our racial problems, but there are others who only express displeasure with "Hollywood" or "liberals" or the "mainstream media." Linder is also, as I recall, the only interviewee who uses the word "nigger" in his discourse, so you see we're dealing with a very polite and civil group here. Maybe a little too polite and civil, because I detected much more resignation than anger in many of these folks.
"Carolyn Davies," for example, is a 53-year-old widow who has moved several times to avoid "minorities" and is contemplating moving again soon, this time to Maine. "Safe in Maine" is in fact the chapter heading for her piece, and she ends by saying "I keep thinking, where can I go to be safe when I get older? I am thinking of moving to Maine. I think it is safe there still." How ironic (and how pathetic) those words sounded to me as I thought about how the jews (and their liberal Christian cohorts) have recently been importing all those Bantu savages into Maine.
There is one self-described "Angry White Woman," however, who shows some spirit as well as a sense of humor. I laughed at the story she told about the time she was in a Barnes and Noble bookstore and came across the book 101 Redneck Jokes.. She went up to the manager and asked him if he had any nigger joke books. When he looked shocked and said no, she said to him, "well, you shouldn't have this one either" as she pointed to the redneck book. She also said the Mexicans can have California back, but that Whites should first scorch everything and leave it the way it was when they first arrived, "dirt, clay and leaf huts." Nevertheless, even she soon plans to quietly leave California and settle further north where she hopes the snow and cold will deter the Mexcrement from following her.
Unfortunately, there is not one among these 16 who is unequivocally optimistic about our racial future. The most hopeful is perhaps Washington bookstore owner and longtime activist Joseph Bishop, who closes with these words:
It may just be that our civilization will collapse. We will be swamped with non-whites and that will be the end of us. But then again, a hundred years from now all this insanity we're seeing today might be looked on as something that was ludicrous, crazy, a historical anomaly. Western civilization might clean itself up or even spawn something new and better. That would be wonderful.
Yes, indeed that would be wonderful, but none of these speakers offers any program that will help get us there. But I can't blame any of them for this, because I've never heard any rational White Nationalist leader offer us a detailed, step-by-step program. They all admit they don't have the answer as to how exactly we're going to get from where we are to where we want to be. The "movement," as I see it, is trying to drive to a destination without a road map.
Be that as it may, Griffin's latest book is filled with life stories of ordinary men and women conscious of their racial roots and unafraid to live their lives in accordance with their own traditional values, not the values promulgated by the jews in our popular culture. These are thoughtful and articulate folks, and this is a book that deserves to be a bestseller. It would be particularly appropriate for it to be sold at airport book stores, because it is a short volume that could easily be read in its entirety on a coast-to-coast flight. Unfortunately Griffin faced the same problems with "Sheaf" that he did with his earlier book. The jews, as you can imagine, won't touch this one either, so it has also been privately published. However, I see that it is currently available on amazon.com for around $12, and at that price there is no reason it shouldn't be on every White Nationalist's bookshelf.
RICH BROOKS
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