100 Books Like Grassroots Leviathan

How did the war start? Certainly, the South seceded after Lincoln’s election, but was apocalyptic war inevitable? Why did the North rise to defend the Union so passionately? If I may be so bold, Adam Goodheart’s 2011 book reads like the gripping sequel to my book.

In a series of powerful, beautifully written geographically and biographically focused stories, running from the 1860 election to the electric response to Fort Sumter, the rising of the state militias, the horrors of Bull Run, and the first moves toward emancipation at Fort Monroe.

In wonderful narrative form, Goodheart tracks the eruption of Union sentiment and the emergence of Lincoln as president, both so essential to carrying the North through the war. A great read, presenting important perspective on coming of the Civil War. 

Fighting a war required a lot of money, and David Thomson explains how that money was found. His story is surprising. Previous American wars going back to the Revolution had been funded by great merchants and financiers, but fundraising in the Union drew on a new source, by an unexpected figure.

The notorious financier Jay Cooke would later describe his role in organizing huge sales of U.S. war bonds to the American public as his finest hour. Certainly, there were bonds sold in European markets, especially in Germany, but the bulk of the war finance was based on ordinary Americans buying bonds to support the cause for a little old-age security in years to come.

Thompon’s account shows how the surge of Union sentiment that Goodheart describes as a “Civil War Awakening” was translated into a surge of patriotic popular capitalism that anticipated the American experience in the two world… show more.

What were the politics of the Union army during the grinding years of the war? How did fighting soldiers, one slice of the complexity of the northern population, feel about the Union and the rising questions of slavery and emancipation? And how was this opinion shaped by a generally conservative officer corps, especially the West Point elite who had trained and served with men who were now leading the Confederate army?

In a prize-winning book, Zachery Fry carefully examines these questions in the Army of the Potomac. He found a consensus on union and a great gradient of opinion on slavery. West Pointers suppressed antislavery views, while antislavery opinion grew in formations led by men coming from the ranks of state militias, either already inclined toward abolitionism or radicalized by their experience of the realities of slavery in the South.

In the end, what unified many Union soldiers in the… show more.

In September 2017, a new statue was unveiled on the south side of Philadelphia’s City Hall. In contrast to the equestrian statues of Union generals–and former mayor Frank Rizzo (now removed)–to the north of City Hall, this statue commemorated a young Black man who rose to leadership in the South Street neighborhoods of Civil War Philadelphia before he was assassinated during an election riot in 1871.

Biddle and Murray, veteran reporters at the Philadelphia Inquirer, tell a sweeping story of crisis, war, and reconstruction, reaching from the city out across the country, in a powerful narrative focusing on Octavius V. Catto, one of the era’s most tragically lost figures. Catto, the son of a minister who purchased his family’s freedom from slavery in Charleston and settled in Philadelphia, was starting to work as a teacher when the war broke out.

From this position in the Black community, Catto raised a… show more.

This book, like Mao and After, credits the era of Mao with far more achievements than they are given by the political and intellectual elite in post-Mao China. This book particularly focuses on the collective system or what was called the Commune and exploits the technical innovation and economic developments under the Commune. This is in total contrast to the accepted wisdom that there was economic stagnation in the era of Mao

I grew up hearing about how civilization emerged because of striving to get there, that it was intentional and glorious, a huge progressive step.

Scott is brilliant at showing how living in large, organized groups was an unintended outcome, fragile and precarious and often a failure: not an accident but not willed into being, either. It came from certain kinds of environments, mostly riverine regions that often flooded, where humans could live in larger groups because of grains. Then, as powerful people were able to “tax” the possessors of grain-bearing plants—because they were visible and vulnerable—states emerged.

In other words, Scott shows that our ways of life came from something more like natural law than from any sort of revelation or forethought. The nature of grains did it. 

Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer, a prolific author, an environmental activist, cultural critic, and poet.

In this book, one of his many, he raises important questions about the practice of agriculture in the United States and some of the consequences including loss of small farms and communities, the ecological effects, energy use, and agriculture's externalities.

His work has been largely ignored by the agricultural community including most faculty in colleges of agriculture. He writes eloquently about his concern that man was not made to rule the world and his claim that to rule the world we must conquer it.

Humans and agriculture have conquered and ignored and externalized the cultural, environmental, and human costs, which Berry explores in detail. His work has not been ignored by the environmental community.

I like this one because it reveals what is wrong with modern meat production, not only within the broad context of industrial agriculture but also the governmental policies and corporate control of what we eat.

It ranges widely from corporate control of plant and animal genetics to who raises what we eat and dictates where and how it is grown, to the chemicals that go onto our fruits and vegetables and into our bodies, to government oversight and regulation of food safety and animal welfare; to corporate concentration at every link in the food chain.

But what I appreciate most of all is Hauter’s extensive and thoughtful analysis of what can be done to break up the foodopolies and rebuild a healthy and just food system.

Farmer and author Wendell Berry is a personal hero of mine. From his home in Kentucky, Berry has been writing about regenerative agriculture for decades. The Art of the Commonplace gathers together twenty of his best essays. They articulate a compelling vision for people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary life. Berry is also the author of numerous works of poetry and fiction.

This short (190-page) book shows how the global food system is intrinsically connected to world region’s diverse developmental trajectories, covering the colonial era to the green revolution to the contemporary corporate-dominated food system.

Historically, agriculture has been subordinated ever more tightly to capitalist imperatives of profit – based upon increased, faster, and cheaper production. Agriculture has been transformed from a ‘closed loop system’, where soil fertility was renewed based upon locally-available resources (such as animal manure), to a through-flow system dependent upon external inputs.

This shift raised yields for a while, but at the cost of soil exhaustion and the accumulation of power and resources in the hands of agrochemical companies at the expense of the small farmer sector.

Weis suggests that we need to consider new ways of producing our food, which would also establish new forms of world development.