Indignez Vous! (Cry Out! or Get Angry!) by Stéphane Hessel:

This booklet by a socialist who is also a French Ambassador is the publishing sensation of the year. A translation is here  http://indignez-vou-cry-out-hessel.blogspot.com/ . At 29 pages (only 13 of which are text) and a cost of only 3 euros, the outraged essay of a 93-year-old man, urging the nation’s youth to resist capitalist greed and corruption and fight to uphold universal human rights sounds like the kind of publication that would be largely ignored. Au contraire!

Perhaps the timing of the book, released during troubled times of economic crisis and inequality has rung a bell for the people of France. Maybe it’s the fact that the author is a holocaust survivor and almost a century old, which lends credibility to his message. Whatever the reason, Indignez Vous! by Stéphane Hessel is the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.fr, and has been for some time. The book has sold over 600,000 in just three months, much to the shock and delight of Hessel’s small, left-wing publishers, who are more accustomed to print runs in the hundreds than hundreds of thousands. You should be able to get a copy of this insurrectionary little book to wave around (and read of course) by ordering ISBN ISBN 291193976X.

The English translation is here:  http://indignez-vou-cry-out-hessel.blogspot.com/ .

QUOTES FROM STEPHANE HESSEL'S "INDIGNEZ-VOU!":

"I think, naturally, that terrorism is unacceptable; but it is necessary to acknowledge that when people are occupied by forces immensely superior to their own, popular reaction cannot be altogether bloodless."

"However, to proclaim 'violence is not effective' is more important than to know whether one must condemn or not those who devote themselves to it."

"...not this society of immigrants without papers -- expulsions, suspicion regarding the immigrants. Not this society where they call into question retirement and programs for French national health and pension plans. Not this society where mass media are in the hands of the rich."

"...the problem is the power of money, so much opposed by the Resistance, and of the big, boldfaced, selfish man, with his own servants in the highest spheres of the State."
"... it was necessary to keep an ear open towards communism to compensate against American capitalism...."

"There is certainly another comprehension of history. It says progress is made by "freedom," competition, striving for " always more"; it can be as if living in a destructive hurricane."

"To the young people, I say: Look around you, you will find issues that justify your indignation — facts about treatment of immigrants, of "illegal" immigrants, of the Roma...."

"That Jews can, themselves, perpetrate war crimes is unbearable. Alas, history does not give enough examples of people who draw lessons from their own history."

"Also, let us always be called in a truly peaceful insurrection against means of mass communication that offer as a vista for our youth only the consumption of mass trivia, contempt of the weakest and the culture, a generalized amnesia, and the hard competition of all against all."