Books like Goddess of Anarchy — picked by fans

Let’s face it. Christianity has been used to support slavery, encourage white people to be racist, and send women back to the 1950s.

That’s why I found Jarod Roll’s Spirit of Rebellion refreshing and important. It was a good reminder that faith can also provide the moral courage necessary for change. It can unite people instead of dividing them.

I can’t imagine a place and time more disposed to racist divisions than rural Missouri in the late 19th century. Yet, poor white and Black farmers there found common ground as rebels against the emerging capitalist order. How? Through the Pentecostal revivals that swept the region in this same period. If that’s not a message of hope in these trying times, then I don’t know what is.

Half of the people who experienced the French Revolution were women, and the recognition of their role in these events is one of the biggest transformations in historians’ perspectives of the past half-century. Dominque Godineau’s thoroughly documented book depicts the everyday lives of women in the revolutionary era and the activists who paved the way for modern feminist movements.

Durruti is a massive 800-page biography of a Spanish anarchist that carried “the future in is heart and a gun in each pocket” and, at the same time, portrays the twists and turns of the Spanish Revolution and the millions of people who made it. A model of how to place a radical, working-class life within a broader context, Durruti is also a blow-by-blow account of a revolution and its battles, trials, and upheavals. I shamelessly tried to re-create such a gripping biography when writing my own book. Who would have thought an 800-page brick could be such a page-turner?

Hernández’s book is one of the latest to pick up on the growing trend of studies about or that include anarchist women activists. What is particularly alluring about her book is its transnational focus as she explores how Mexican women agitated for anarchism in the decades preceding, during, and following the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Hernández focuses on one woman in particular: Caritina Piña Montalvo, an anarcho-syndicalist whose fight for gender equity linked anarchists on both sides of the border. Besides its important focus on gender and women’s issues, Hernández’s study illustrates how so much of the writing about Latin American anarchism has become transnational in focus as activists crossed borders—either physically or through correspondence—to promote the anarchist ideal.  

LeMasters hung out at a tavern in Wisconsin from 1967 to 1972, talking to factory workers who held well-paying, unionized jobs in the heyday of American industrial production. Working-class lives are so different now that I wish I could enter a time machine and travel back to the 1960s and talk to working-class men then. LeMasters’s book is as close as one can get to doing that. He describes the outlook of the tavern regulars on their work, their families, and the world around them. Despite their prosperity, they express attitudes about public life that, in some respects, would not sound out of place in a focus group of working-class adults today.   

In 2011, I spent a semester in London; I had arranged to meet Eric Hobsbawm, the famous historian whom I adored. Unfortunately, he was too ill when I arrived and died before I could meet him. In this book he did not only surprise me with his insight into episodes of rebellions and revolutions, what is even more scintillating is that he mixes all that with the evolving emergence of the particular world of jazz.

Rarely a personality with such broad scientific knowledge has managed to be so uncommonly common in its very specific empathy for a particular cultural obsession. The book shows how important it is to walk on two feet: The ordinary animal within its species and the extraordinary scientific observer, letting his spirit fly above singular events.

Another fine novel by a great writer who, like me, hailed from Ayrshire. I quote from it in my book. I became aware of William McIlvanney when I attended Kilmarnock Academy between 1967 and 1969 and his first novel Remedy is None was passed around the students in their final year at the school, before heading for University. Having a living, breathing novelist living in the town was really something, and it made us all think that perhaps we could become writers too! All of his books are excellent but Docherty touched me personally because it describes a mining community, similar to the town I grew up in, Galston. It also explores the linguistic tension between Scots and English which is the experience of most people growing up in the Lowlands of Scotland.

This book held my hands to a high bar while accumulating, through good storytelling, the truths of a company, both clear and nuanced, as I searched for them in the early George A. Hormel & Company.

Arsenault’s book upends many beliefs we hold about “good companies” that provide stable, long-term jobs to hundreds of employees, like this prominent and popular paper mill in Mexico, Maine, where Arsenault’s family worked through multiple generations. The long-term economic safety and security that employees had felt for years is upended by their numerous life-threatening, sometimes intractable, cancers.

I loved this book for its investigative environmental journalism, its exposure of truths the powerful did not want to be exposed, and its influence on my own research. 

Sometimes, the analytical frame of a book completely changes one’s understanding of a phenomenon, and that was the case with this history of work song.

By showing that singing and music-making at work were silenced in the latter half of the 19th century by the noise of machines and the discipline of factory bosses, Korczynski et. al. provided me with a wholly new way to understand the function of music in an industrialized capitalist society: in terms of the segregation of labor and leisure.

This book wrecked me; it’s such a deep dive into the lives of the woman brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold reconstructs their lives with great empathy, bringing them to the forefront of the story. The five were real women who felt love, pain, and hope—not faceless victims of sensationalized murder.

These women are often portrayed as “five prostitutes” in pop culture, but Rubenhold shows that there is no evidence of sex work for most of the women. This book pulls back the curtain on the tension, violence, poverty, and heartbreak in Victorian London. This book brought me to absolute tears.