18 books like Palestine

I had read the original book many years ago, but I was interested in this book, as what the Rickard sisters were doing, an adaption, was similar to my project. 

The graphic novel is a brilliant distillation of Robert Tressell's very long prose book, never simplifying the core political messages. 

The lead, Owen, is berated, hated, and admired for his determined belief in the idea of a better world. His explanation and the Rickard sisters' visual depiction of that world are indeed inspirational. 

The original book is said to have inspired many political thinkers on the left, with George Orwell describing it as "a book that everyone should read."

The original was described by its publisher as "Damnably subversive but extraordinarily real." Sophie and Scarlett Rickard's gorgeously designed and illustrated adaption certainly lives up to that description.

I grew up in a politically active family but had never read The Communist Manifesto. Martin Rowson's adaption blew me away. 

The book opens with an amazing series of spreads; in bold black and white and blood-splatted red, he charts the development of human history from the serfdom of early civilisations through the Middle Ages, up to the slave trade, the age of revolutions and the Industrial Revolution that ripped workers away from life in the fields and into factory labour and then on. 

From this, Marx and Engels begin their walk through the rest of the book, announcing, "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism."

Rowson’s dense and beautiful artwork makes demands on the reader; in its multi-layered depths of meaning, it’s a phenomenal achievement.  

Another book that I highly recommend is Vanni. It has a brilliant mix of deft cartoon imagery and meticulously researched verbatim materials. 

Dix and Pollock recount the story of one Tamil family’s journey from war-torn Sri Lanka to a place of troubled refuge in the UK. 

Vanni’s depiction of Tamil communities, caught in the crossfire of the brutal conflict between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamil Tigers, the devastating tsunami that hits the region, and then the refugee crisis that follows is an important and necessary reportage on one of the world’s most under-reported conflicts.

In researching my graphic novel, I read many comics on slavery.

This atmospheric account of enslaved Virginians in 1831 is a hard read, but it made a great impression on me.

Powerfully, Baker uses the verbatim testimony from the confession of Nat Turner as he awaited execution in jail. The narrative does not pull its punches; in one scene, Turner recounts the murder of a plantation owner's baby. It is shocking, but Baker skillfully puts this in the context of the brutality of the lived experience of the enslaved, their own children being routinely abducted and sold by their masters.

The comic is a powerful slave narrative in this sparse and mostly wordless retelling of America’s most famous slave revolt.

Virus Tropical is a Latin American Book, a Colombian book, an Argentinian Book, an Ecuadorian Book. Virus tropical talks about the nineties, if you are from Colombia you recognize the towns, the T-shirts, the music, the buses. So many peripheries mixed up and telling you about the coming of age of the main character. So many important things touched while touching on the most vapid-everyday things. The accents, the way the characters interact, I was able to identify with all of this while reading this graphic novel. Virus Tropical is a great book, I’m glad it was translated into English.

This is not a best-seller graphic novel, you don’t see this book on every bookstore shelf. I discovered it because of Nina Mickwitz’s Documentary Comics. I ordered it from the library network that we had at my grad school. My degeneration is a Jewel of a book in many senses, it is a sincere book, a dialogue that goes through many channels: the images drawn, the text typed, and the way the book was made. The shifting in the line makes you think about the process and the author not just as a character but as a person experiencing the world from certain conditions and telling you about that experience.

I am not recommending a particular volume or compilation. In general I love the work of Harvey Pekar.  He has brought me closer to Documentary Comics than any other author. He worked with reflections and anecdotes and was one of those authors that from the writing was able to defy the common places in comics making. Yes, he was a scriptwriter, but he pulled out so many amazing comics from the graphic formula and made them work. I remember seeing gigantic balloons with blocks of text. Pages and pages of close-ups, and they weren’t boring.  A comic about him reflecting on his masculinity by unclogging the toilet. Amazing.

I love “Persepolis” because the author very accurately and with a great amount of humor describes, and through graphics, portrays the very heavy topic of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. 

She makes it easy for people who weren’t there at the time and are not a part of the culture or history to imagine what happened. I like how she describes family relationships, especially with her parents, in a tribal culture. In a very transparent way, she accurately describes the differences between private family life and the one that is portrayed publicly.

Time and again, I’ve given this book to folks in need of inspiration or opened it on a bad day to remind myself of the astonishing inventiveness, generosity, and stamina working people possess.

Recounting the life of a Mexican-American farm worker who became a community activist and union organizer, the book emerged from hundreds of hours of conversation in which Maria Elena Lucas told her story to Fran Leeper Buss and from hundreds of pages of creative writing Lucas had earlier produced. The result is riveting, because of the breadth of Lucas’s experience and the depth of what she shares about her inner life.

Especially stirring to me are the passages that lay out a personal theology that sees the divine in ordinary people and identifies God as a woman of color seeking the best for her children.    

When workers organize, it’s not only for themselves and for generations to come, but also a response to suffering by generations past.

Thomas Bell (born Adalbert Belacyk) brings this to light in his saga of Slovak-American life in steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in a family much like the one at the novel’s center. The story stretches from the 1880s into the mid-1930s, culminating with the unionization of U.S. Steel, a megacorporation that had previously crushed all efforts at labor organizing.

No book offers a more intimate view of what it took to bring this company to the bargaining table, and the unforgettable chapters on family members who didn’t live to see that victory make clear that the fight for a contract manifested a longer, more fundamental struggle for justice and human dignity.