Here are 100 books that Jonathan Schell fans have personally recommended if you like
Jonathan Schell.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
My interest in the decade and in the Cold War came during graduate school. This was where I discovered Carl Sagan’s theory of a nuclear winter: that after a nuclear war, the debris and smoke from nuclear bombs would cover the earth and make it inhabitable for life on earth. Tracing debates between this celebrity scientist and U.S. policymakers revealed a hesitancy on either side to even consider each other’s point of view. This research made me reconsider the pop culture of my youth—films like The Day After and Wargames, music like “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and books from Don DeLillo’s White Noise to Dr. Seuss’ Butter Battle Book—and ultimately see them as part of a political contest in which lives—our lives—were in the balance.
If Andrew Hunt’s book covers swaths of American popular culture to reveal levels of public dissent, Martin’s book takes a similar approach, but with a particular focus on grassroots activism. Across the U.S., activism took many forms. The Nuclear Freeze campaign, with its simple call to halt the arms race, inspired (in June 1982) the largest public protest in American history. Others rebelled against Reagan’s painfully slow response to even recognize the AIDS epidemic, while on college campuses students rallied against Reagan’s policies towards apartheid-era South Africa. Martin’s examination of how various strands of feminism reacted to the conservative backlash of the Reagan Era is an especially welcome addition to the decade’s historiography.
Ronald Reagan looms large in most accounts of the period, encouraging Americans to renounce the activist and liberal politics of the 1960s and '70s and embrace the resurgent conservative wave. But a closer look reveals that a sizable swath of Americans strongly disapproved of Reagan's policies throughout his presidency. With a weakened Democratic Party scurrying for the political center, many expressed their dissatisfaction outside electoral politics. Unlike the civil rights and Vietnam-era protesters, activists of the 1980s often found themselves on the defensive, struggling to preserve the hard-won victories of the previous era. Their successes, then, were not in ushering…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
My interest in the decade and in the Cold War came during graduate school. This was where I discovered Carl Sagan’s theory of a nuclear winter: that after a nuclear war, the debris and smoke from nuclear bombs would cover the earth and make it inhabitable for life on earth. Tracing debates between this celebrity scientist and U.S. policymakers revealed a hesitancy on either side to even consider each other’s point of view. This research made me reconsider the pop culture of my youth—films like The Day After and Wargames, music like “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and books from Don DeLillo’s White Noise to Dr. Seuss’ Butter Battle Book—and ultimately see them as part of a political contest in which lives—our lives—were in the balance.
In the past few decades, politicians and pundits have worked hard to craft our collective memory of the 1980s. Many promote it was a golden age of small government, a booming economy, and a strong, morally-centered foreign policy. Andrew Hunt’s We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes acts as a corollary to this interpretation. Covering aspects of domestic protests, the antinuclear movement, battles over the “Vietnam Syndrome,” and the backlash to Reagan’s foreign policies in Central America and elsewhere, Hunt explores another side of the 1980s Cold War. His book’s title is taken from an off-the-cuff joke Reagan made about destroying the Soviet Union. Doing so at such a tense time in U.S. foreign relations made Reagan’s gaff one that alarmed observers at home and abroad--a testament to how tense the era really was.
In the moments before his weekly radio address hit the airwaves in 1984, Ronald Reagan made an off-the-record joke: 'I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.' As reports of the stunt leaked to the press, many Americans did not find themselves laughing along with the president. Long a fervent warrior against what he termed the 'Evil Empire,' by the mid-1980s, Reagan confronted growing domestic opposition to his revival of the Cold War. While numerous histories of the era have glorified the 'Decade of Greed,' historian Andrew Hunt instead explores the period's robust political…
My interest in the decade and in the Cold War came during graduate school. This was where I discovered Carl Sagan’s theory of a nuclear winter: that after a nuclear war, the debris and smoke from nuclear bombs would cover the earth and make it inhabitable for life on earth. Tracing debates between this celebrity scientist and U.S. policymakers revealed a hesitancy on either side to even consider each other’s point of view. This research made me reconsider the pop culture of my youth—films like The Day After and Wargames, music like “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and books from Don DeLillo’s White Noise to Dr. Seuss’ Butter Battle Book—and ultimately see them as part of a political contest in which lives—our lives—were in the balance.
If Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth examined the scientific, ecological, and social impacts of nuclear war, Robert Scheer’s With Enough Shovels is a direct inquiry into the Reagan Administration about their initial thoughts on the subject. Those thoughts, frankly, are frightening. As the title implicates, then-Deputy Under Secretary of Defense T.J. Jones literally suggested that surviving thermonuclear war was easy: “Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top…it’s the dirt that does it…if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.” Comments by Reagan, Vice President Bush, Defense Secretary Weinberger, and an increasing contingent of “Neo-Conservatives” writing in journals such as Commentary echoed these sentiments. In part, Scheer’s book began a long process of the Reagan Administration scaling back their bravado and recognizing the real dangers of the atomic age.
If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it."" Scheer, a Los Angeles Times reporter and former Ramparts editor, got that assessment of American civil defense capabilities from T. K. Jones, current Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, and a former Boeing manager. What ""T.K."" meant was that, with a shovel, anyone can dig a fallout shelter--a simple hole in the ground with a door over the top and three feet of earth on top of that. ""It's the dirt that does it,"" he said. The fact that…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
My interest in the decade and in the Cold War came during graduate school. This was where I discovered Carl Sagan’s theory of a nuclear winter: that after a nuclear war, the debris and smoke from nuclear bombs would cover the earth and make it inhabitable for life on earth. Tracing debates between this celebrity scientist and U.S. policymakers revealed a hesitancy on either side to even consider each other’s point of view. This research made me reconsider the pop culture of my youth—films like The Day After and Wargames, music like “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and books from Don DeLillo’s White Noise to Dr. Seuss’ Butter Battle Book—and ultimately see them as part of a political contest in which lives—our lives—were in the balance.
This work of fiction arrived at the tail end of the Reagan Era. Read without context, it’s an enjoyable romp through the life of “Gen X’ers” and their pre-professional lives. However, much as psychologists of the 1950s ascribed one root cause of the growing problem of “Juvenile Delinquency” to fears of atomic war, Coupland’s characters are similarly disaffected from growing up during a period of similar fears—fears confirmed when one character dreams of dying in an atomic explosion. In tracing the lives of three fictional characters of this last Cold War generation, Coupland shows the emotional impact of growing up knowing that they could die any day. Seen in this light, Generation X captures the disaffection, disillusion, and dissatisfaction of a generation.
Generation X is Douglas Coupland's classic novel about the generation born from 1960 to 1978―a generation known until then simply as twenty somethings.
Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit pointless jobs in their respective hometowns to find better meaning in life. Adrift in the California desert, the trio develops an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs―"low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create their own modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs as well as disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste,…
I’m a lifelong sci-fi/fantasy reader who loves the way speculative fiction helps us explore who we are, what we could become, and how to troubleshoot the future before we get there. As a parent and active community member, I’m looking for fresh perspectives on how to tackle the increasingly complex challenges of our time, perspectives that go beyond simplistic solutions like finding bad guys and killing them in climactic battles. I hope books that showcase nonviolent social change in all its complexity can help us imagine better ways to make a difference in our own lives.
Another nonfiction book, Healing Resistancedoes a splendid job showing the philosophical connections between nonviolence on an interpersonal level and nonviolent social change movements. Drawing on the tradition of Kingian nonviolence, this book is a useful starting place for anyone who wants to understand what nonviolence is and isn’t as well as how it works. It’s also chock full of recommendations for other books and is a great jumping-off point for further reading. Sometimes nonviolence doesn’t look like what we expect.
An expert in the field offers a mindfulness-based approach to nonviolent action, demonstrating how nonviolence is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation
Nonviolence was once considered the highest form of activism and radical change. And yet its basic truth, its restorative power, has been forgotten. In Healing Resistance, leading trainer Kazu Haga blazingly reclaims the energy and assertiveness of nonviolent practice and shows that a principled approach to nonviolence is the way to transform not only unjust systems but broken relationships.
With over 20 years of experience practicing and teaching Kingian Nonviolence, Haga offers us a practical approach…
My career as an executive and leadership coach led me to recognize the cost of living in misalignment to what holds meaning for us. This incongruence leads to stress, illness, organizational failures, and a lack of honest connection. My work as a coach, and now designing bespoke, restorative experiences and retreats in Portugal, is to hold space for courageous conversations around meaning, purpose, and human connection. My writing has inspired others to be unapologetic about the life they desire and deserve.
While studying for my Leadership Coaching Certification at Georgetown University, I heard Parker Palmer speak and immediately sought out his book.
His concepts of a "circle of trust" and his description of the yearning for an undivided life that encompasses our truth and how we operate in the world helped me navigate my choices and informed my approach to my work with organizational clients.
Through his work, I learned the cost of living a fragmented life and sought wholeness in my life and for my clients.
In A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer reveals the same compassionate intelligence and informed heart that shaped his best-selling books Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach. Here he speaks to our yearning to live undivided lives-lives that are congruent with our inner truth-in a world filled with the forces of fragmentation.
Mapping an inner journey that we take in solitude and in the company of others, Palmer describes a form of community that fits the limits of our active lives. Defining a "circle of trust" as "a space between us that honors the soul," he shows how people…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
Photography has always been more than just images for me. I love capturing the moments that define a movement. I started out photographing punk bands, drawn to their raw creativity. Later, I shot Hollywood legends, but at the core, it was always about the same thing: artists fighting to make something that lasts. These stories feel like snapshots of a life I know well, and they bring me back to the packed punk club where everything started.
As someone who’s spent a career capturing moments, both on film and in digital, I’ve had a front-row seat to the way the internet has upended creative industries. At first, it seemed like a gift. Then, I watched artists lose control of their work, their rights, and their livelihoods. That’s why I decided to push back by founding The American Society for Collective Rights Licensing.
Reading this book felt like having someone finally call out the problem for what it is. It made me think about how much we’ve sacrificed in the name of “progress”.
In this sharp and witty book, long-time Silicon Valley observer and author Andrew Keen argues that, on balance, the Internet has had a disastrous impact on all our lives.
By tracing the history of the Internet, from its founding in the 1960s to the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989, through the waves of start-ups and the rise of the big data companies to the increasing attempts to monetize almost every human activity, Keen shows how the Web has had a deeply negative effect on our culture, economy and society.
Informed by Keen's own research and interviews, as…
Iʻve been travelling to islands before realizing I was seeking them. It was my political convictions that brought me to Haiti and Cuba, and later to Indonesia and Thai Islands due to my philosophical interests. When I headed to Greece for the first time it was to Corfu and the Peloponnese, my lineage, but also to Ithaca, Crete, the Cyclades, and eventually to Lesvos. Now I live in Hawaiʻi. I was attracted to the poetics of island landscapes, but as a scholar of space, society, and justice, I also understood that islands hold distinct sets of constraints and opportunities that require further study with intersectional and decolonial perspectives.
This is a spectacular and detailed book—think city as island—that can engross you over and over again. Simone, development activist and scholar, carries us into four African cities and shares the grassroots efforts of people coming together to create systems of trust for economic exchange and meeting social needs—without or outside the state and capital. It is the potential for alternatives that makes this book so attractive to me and inspired my own work on convivial economics. Simone helps us to see that new ways of being and acting collaboratively can spring up and offer a blueprint for how we can move forward in solidarity.
Among government officials, urban planners, and development workers, Africa's burgeoning metropolises are frequently understood as failed cities, unable to provide even basic services. Whatever resourcefulness does exist is regarded as only temporary compensation for fundamental failure. In For the City Yet to Come, AbdouMaliq Simone argues that by overlooking all that does work in Africa's cities, this perspective forecloses opportunities to capitalize on existing informal economies and structures in development efforts within Africa and to apply lessons drawn from them to rapidly growing urban areas around the world. Simone contends that Africa's cities do work on some level and to…
Ι have a passion for critical theory since I was intrigued by the idea, which originates in Marx’s Capital, that what limits our freedom and democracy is not the apparent personified power hold by the state and politicians. On the contrary, real power lies in capital, that's in abstract labour, which is the labour that must succumb to the standards of time is money, that runs through each one of us. Therefore, in my postdoctoral research in the last 13 years, I have attempted to follow this idea in the history of political philosophy. During my research, I realized that the mainstream reading of Marxism and critical theory is far from what it should be.
The Zapatista movement and the series of demonstrations since Seattle are fighting for radical social change in terms that have nothing to do with the taking of state power. This is in clear opposition to the traditional Marxist theory of revolution which centres on taking state power. In this book, John Holloway asks how we can reformulate our understanding of revolution as the struggle against power, not for power. After a century of failed attempts by revolutionary and reformist movements to bring about radical social change, the concept of revolution itself is in crisis. John Holloway opens up the theoretical debate, reposing some of the basic concepts of Marxism and grounded in a rethinking of Marx's concept of 'fetishisation'—how doing is transformed into being.
This book is a profound search for a theory of social change. Through clearing away the cobwebs of revolutionary socialism, it renews the fight for the ending of capitalism and the construction of a new, fairer world.
After a century of failed attempts by radical projects, the concept of revolution itself is in crisis. By asking the deepest questions about the nature of humanity, work, capitalism, organisation and resistance, John Holloway looks sharply at modern protest movements and provides tools for creating new strategies.
First published in 2002, this book marked a shift in the understanding of Autonomism, Anarchism and…
I became interested in social and family history when my Turkish friend, Ahmet Ceylan, told me amazing stories about his family. An academic by training, I used my expertise in the history of Turkey to explore the archives and uncover extraordinary details about the lives of the Robinsons. My field research took me to the wolds of Lincolnshire, the side streets of Istanbul, and the foothills of the Himalayas. I am keen to learn more about my own family, and for my next book, I am exploring the lives of people who owned/occupied the land/property where I live in Oxford, UK.
I was fascinated by this book and its colourful stories about the lives of individuals who played a role in the formation of today’s Istanbul. The backdrop is the famous Pera Palace in the centre of Istanbul, the much-loved hotel of the crime writer, Agatha Christie. Much of the book concentrates on the inter-war period. Superbly written, you can almost see and hear the sights and sounds of the alleyways, nightclubs, shops, and restaurants of a now almost forgotten Istanbul.
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, so many spies mingled in the lobby of Istanbul's Pera Palace Hotel that the manager put up a sign asking them to relinquish seats to paying guests.
As the multi-ethnic empire became a Turkish republic, Russian emigres sold family heirlooms, an African American impresario founded a jazz club and Miss Turkey became the first Muslim beauty queen. Turkey's president Kemal Ataturk, Muslim feminist Halide Edip, the exiled Leon Trotsky and the future Pope John XXIII fought for new visions of human freedom. During the Second World War, German intellectuals ran from the Nazis while Jewish…
