Books like Iconoclasm — picked by fans

This book tells the story of when, why, and by whom Confederate monuments were erected in the United States.

I love its careful attention to race and class, which helps us to understand how this process consolidated white supremacy but also undermined a revolutionary working-class politics. There is a terrific chapter on Stone Mountain in Georgia, which has been described as "the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world."

The historical context provided by the book helped me to make sense of what was at stake in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and in the white supremacist backlash to it that we are currently living through. Most memorable sentence: "Shuffling statues around our cities is like moving an abusive priest to another parish."

This book is an intensive examination of "Rhodes Must Fall" – a student-led movement that erupted in South Africa in 2015 to protest the persistence of the legacies of apartheid more than two decades after its formal end.

The movement called for the removal of a statue of settler colonist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town as a metaphor for the dismantling of these legacies.

I love the book because while it is written in solidarity with the movement’s aim to dismantle white supremacy, it is also deeply attentive to how easily a politics of decolonisation can be misdirected at other marginalised groups – in this case, Black migrants from outside South Africa, who have frequently been at the receiving end of xenophobic violence.      

In contrast to stories of statue toppling that we encounter in the West in recent years, India has witnessed a frenzy of statue building of political and religious figures over several decades.

This book is the most theoretically sophisticated account of this phenomenon. It situates statue-building in India in its historical and political context, developing an account of "iconopraxis" – the use of icons to assert and consolidate community identity and presence in the public sphere.

I love Jain’s attention to the material lives of statues, which she elucidates through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors. The book wonderfully complicates the distinction between the religious and the secular, demonstrating how this is blurred in India’s many monumental statue assemblages.     

From the title of this book about "so-called Australia," it’s clear that we are going to hear a deeply subversive account of the politics and history of that country from an Aboriginal perspective.

In addition to providing a powerful critique of colonial narratives about white settler "discovery" that remain dominant in Australian public culture, the authors curate a rich archive of Aboriginal disruption of those narratives.

These have taken the form of not only statue protests of the kind that we have seen in other parts of the world, but also art, music, films, mock ethnographic documentaries, counter-memorials, and more. The book shows how another history of the continent has always been narrated, even if settler audiences have lacked the literacy necessary to understand it.  

This book unveils some of the mysteries of how our brains are designed and function.

Although not written from a biblical perspective, it unveils some of the reasons for the dual nature described in scripture—why we often hear two voices in our head and how we decide which one to follow. It also points out the challenges of group wisdom and convention versus thinking independently, thus avoiding the deception that creeps into group thinking.

As a Christian, I found this book unintentionally providing insight into biblical principles for decision-making and leadership. God is the owner and source of all truth, and we can see Him in everything.

Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers, not that I write like her, (I wish I had more of her style, for sure) but for her courage and creative will that stretched her work beyond the boundaries of what existed at the time. Along the way, you can pick out the raw material of her life that she transmuted into fiction. What great fortune to hear directly from Virginia about her philosophy of life and her vision of art.

Although this is the story of a house from the early 17th century to the 1960s, it offers a fascinating insight into the lives of the four families who lived there in turn as they won and lost fortunes, married well and badly, and survived the events of history.

Martin Amis’s first novel, published in 1973, was the first book that I read from cover to cover. 

I was only eighteen at the time and even though my memory of the story is vague, I remember being drawn in by the unique and compelling way it was told.

I went on to read other works by the same author, but The Rachel Papers has a particular poignancy, in that it has lingered in my psyche for over forty years. Even in adolescence, I came to realise that books are as individual as the person reading them.  

Unable to finish a manuscript? This delicious book came about (I’m told) by accident, when its author, struggling with his vast magnum opus, decided to put it down, almost randomly, into a little book of startling essays. The result is an eye-opening study of how “things” need “persons” to speak on their behalf, becoming personable. Includes amazing insights into iconoclasm, ecological litigation, and the legal fight of Abolitionists. And teaches how to write less, cut more, and edit with creative abandon.

Nietzsche studies are a cottage industry unto themselves. There are thousands of monographs, anthologies, and papers, which are conveniently searchable at the Weimarer Nietzsche-Bibliographie. My “five best books” are not necessarily the interpretations I personally consider by some measure the ‘best’, in the sense of being the most ‘correct’. They are instead the ones I find most helpful for a reader to interpret Nietzsche in a responsible, well-informed way for themselves. 

R. J. Hollingdale is a great starting point for a novice. He was that rare combination of translator, biographer, and philosopher—and as such, his work is approachable for any intellectually curious reader. It was first published in 1965, at a time when one really did have to argue for Nietzsche’s place as a canonical philosopher rather than just a brilliant writer, bombastic iconoclast, or politically-dangerous driver of the pre-war German Zeitgeist. Even if somewhat dated, his book… show more.