Working the Waterfront

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 having