Pretty much the title. I’m looking for something interesting to read. Feel free to share anything you’ve read recently or something that you found fascinating. Thanks!
Edit: Thank you to everyone who gave me a suggestion/list. If I didn’t reply specifically to you, please don’t take offense. Your recommendation was added to my list. I’ve got a great selection to work with now.
My favourite communism book is
Michael ParentiAlbert Szymanski’s “Human Rights in the Soviet Union”. Loaded with statistics and tables detailing the material living conditions in the USSR over its lifetime. You must be a nerd about numerical data to enjoy it, but if you are, it’s fucking awesome.If you want extremely good scifi, read Adrien Tschaikovsky’s Children of Time.
Oh yeah it’s dope ass hyper intelligent jumping spider time
Yeah, the USSR was crazy like that. The scifi book is also fine I guess
Ooh that definitely sounds like something I’d be into. Thanks!!
Don’t you mean by Albert Szymanski? There’s no book written by Parenti that has a title like that
Corrected, brain fart. Thanks!
The Jakarta Method
An Indigenous People’s History of the United States
Settlers (am reading this now)
Black Reconstruction in America (frankly, most modern historiography on Reconstruction is in agreement with this thick-ass book, but DuBois was the OG)
SuperImperialism (also thick)
The Fort Bragg Cartel
American Sirens (this and The Fort Bragg Cartel are pretty quick reads compared to the others, and the ones you can most easily shoe-horn into conversation with regular people)
These all sound interesting, especially SuperImperialism. Thanks for sharing!
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne
And as others have mentioned The Jakarta Method and Blackshirts and Reds.
Everything I’ve read by Gerald Horne is straight fire
We’re currently reading “This Soviet World” by Anna Louise Strong, on chapter 3 right now very easy to catch up if you want to join a reading group.
I’ve never been in a reading group before. Am I allowed to lurk for a bit? Haha
Yeah for sure 👍
You
the girl reading this. Join the reading group! I’m not asking.
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Blackshirts and Reds by Saint Michael Parenti
Life changing book if you haven’t read it already.
Going onto my list. Thank you!
Against His-Story! Against Leviathan! by Fredy Perlman
Liberalism: A Counter-History by the goat Domenico Losurdo
A Brief History of Neoliberalism by the not so good, because he’s a limited (British-)American, David Harvey.
I’ve just finished Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economic Theory. It was a long and extensive read (800 pages) but completely worth since it personally made socialist governance on the technical side easier to comprehend. The author prefaces right from the start with the fact that this book is not a compilation of quotes from Marx and co and an exegesis thereof, instead it goes over economic laws and mechanisms based upon contemporary, academic works and quantitative data. The only caveat is that the book was published in the 60s and so it is quite outdated (especially when addressing the Soviet economy).
Ernest Mandel is a Belgian economist who seems Marxist-Leninist enough to support and understand the USSR from a political viewpoint while providing (what I found to be valid) criticism on certain economic policies during Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s office.
Sounds interesting. The technical aspect has piqued my interest. Even if its old, it was relavent for the time. Thank you!
the sleepwalkers a book about how people most distinctly did not sleep walk into ww1 but a complex web of bullshit lead to it
Ordinary Men. It’s about how people were convinced (or how they rationalized to themselves) to commit atrocities during WWII.
Ugh, heartbreaking stuff. I know it still happens a ton today but man, just horrible. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check this one out.
- Anything by E.H. Carr
- Ragtime (Doctorow). It’s not a history, but Emma Goldman talks to Evelyn Nesbit.
- Congo from Leopold to Kabila : A Peoples History. Originally read just to learn more about Lumumba, but rest is solid. Author also was guest on Rev Left Radio or Guerilla History.
- The Furies (Mayer). French and Russian revolutions.
- Arab Spring, Libyan Winter
- The Korean War : A History (Cummings)
- Family of Secrets
Thanks for the list! A lot of these sound interesting.
