Here are 100 books that Lives of the Orange Men fans have personally recommended if you like
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Iâm a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, Iâve worked on different forms of protesting and street politics in twentieth-century Europe, always with an eye to how these histories might speak to the present. Having taught at the British University of Warwick, Iâm now teaching high school students in Berlin, a career change that raised a simple but fundamental question once again: Why should we bother with history? What can we learn from history today? My passion for histories of protesting provides the answer to this question: These are histories that inspire dreaming, struggling, experimentingâand continuing to do so despite failures.
A lot has been written about the famous May â68 in France, but to me, Kristin Rossâs book stands out because of what she argues was at the heart of the protests: they were an experiment âin declassification, in disrupting the natural âgivenness of places,ââ an attempt to question the very order of society.
Students left their spaces of study to engage with workers; workersâor at least some of themârefused to return to the hell their workplace was: they didnât want to function as students or workers anymore. This vision of transgressing social or spatial boundaries, I believe, still speaks to the present. It promises a life not determined by social roles, a society not divided by neat sociological categories.
During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed-no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications.
Kristin Ross shows how the current official memory of May '68 came to serve aâŚ
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 runâŚ
Iâm a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, Iâve worked on different forms of protesting and street politics in twentieth-century Europe, always with an eye to how these histories might speak to the present. Having taught at the British University of Warwick, Iâm now teaching high school students in Berlin, a career change that raised a simple but fundamental question once again: Why should we bother with history? What can we learn from history today? My passion for histories of protesting provides the answer to this question: These are histories that inspire dreaming, struggling, experimentingâand continuing to do so despite failures.
Workers ignoring the authority of foremen, organizing disruptive checker-board strikesâonly those whose names started with a certain letter put down tools, but enough to bring work to a haltâforming alliances with rebellious students and battling the police in the streets: thatâs the story of Italy around 1968, the place of some of the most radical and imaginative protests in the post-war era.
What workers demanded was as simple as it was radical: we want everything. Nanni Balestriniâs novel by the same title memorializes these struggles. It achieves what few sober historical accounts can: vividly capturing the dull monotony of labor suffocating young workers and the thrill of agitation on the shop floor and rebellion in the streets.Â
It was the Autumn of 1969, and Italy exploded. Across the north of the country, factory workers stormed out on strike, demanding better pay and working conditions. The slogan "We Want Everything" rang through the streets. Italy's "Hot Autumn" had begun.
In Nanni Balestrini's fictionalized account of the uprising, a young worker from Italy's impoverished south arrives at Fiat's Mirafiori factory in Torino, where he barely scrapes by with fourteen hour days of backbreaking work. His frustration is palpable, and soon he is agitating again his bosses for fun and giving himself minor injuries to win sick leave. Soon enough,âŚ
Iâm a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, Iâve worked on different forms of protesting and street politics in twentieth-century Europe, always with an eye to how these histories might speak to the present. Having taught at the British University of Warwick, Iâm now teaching high school students in Berlin, a career change that raised a simple but fundamental question once again: Why should we bother with history? What can we learn from history today? My passion for histories of protesting provides the answer to this question: These are histories that inspire dreaming, struggling, experimentingâand continuing to do so despite failures.
What fascinates me about the history of protesting isnât only that ordinary people campaigned for or against political change but also that they started experimenting with different ways of living. This is why Sasha Roseneilâs book made me dream and smile: a deeply human and intimate book based on oral history interviews, telling the story of the womenâs protest camp at the Greenham Common Airforce base in England, where American Cruise Missiles equipped with nuclear warheads were stationed.
The women of Greenham Common, as Roseneilâs book wonderfully shows, did more than protest the dangers of nuclear war. In the cold and dirt of the camp, amidst the fear of nuclear annihilation, they built a community of laughter, dancing, hugging, and caring: a âqueer space,â as Roseneil puts it, of trying out alternatives to the Cold War world of bureaucracy and rationality.
This is a book about how individual, social, political and cultural change is created through the actions of ordinary women. It is about a unique community of women where conventions were overturned and lives transformed, and it is about a social movement in which tens of thousands of women confronted the police and military to resist the momentum towards nuclear war. The women's peace camp at Greenham Common represented a new direction for feminism in Britain, a queer post-modern feminism which broke with tradition and destabilized certainties. This book weaves together stories of life at Greeham with analysis of itsâŚ
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother hadâŚ
Iâm a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, Iâve worked on different forms of protesting and street politics in twentieth-century Europe, always with an eye to how these histories might speak to the present. Having taught at the British University of Warwick, Iâm now teaching high school students in Berlin, a career change that raised a simple but fundamental question once again: Why should we bother with history? What can we learn from history today? My passion for histories of protesting provides the answer to this question: These are histories that inspire dreaming, struggling, experimentingâand continuing to do so despite failures.
I hardly imagined the Soviet Union, a place of grey and black, with the only sparks of color being red, to be a place for hippie culture to flourish. Juliane FĂźrstâs book taught me otherwise. It leads into a world of people like Azazello and Ofelia, who look like âangels, creatures from another world, blots of color on a grey canvas, flowers in a concrete desert.â
The book traces how these hippies, against all odds, found ways to distance themselves from the Soviet System, not through open opposition but through dreaming of and living a different life, communally, spiritually, and often on the road. And FĂźrstâs book does more than merely portray Soviet hippies in a fundamentally sympathetic way: It also reveals what we can learn about a larger society by studying those at the margins. It is an unusual but highly illuminating perspective on the late Soviet Union.
Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland takes the reader on a journey into the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies. In the face of disapproval and repression, they created a version of Western counterculture, skillfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. Flowers through Concrete takes its readers into the underground hippieland and beyond, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering both an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study of transnational youth culture and East-West globalization.
Flowers through Concrete is based on over a hundredâŚ
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.
This book brings to life the story of the little-known Frederick Bruce Thomas, born in 1872 to ex-slaves who had become successful farmers in Mississippi. I was amazed at how the entrepreneurial Frederick found employment in various cities across Europe before becoming a successful nightclub owner in Moscow and then in Istanbul after the Bolshevik Revolution. Well-researched and documented, the book critiques American racism and, in my opinion, offers a new and refreshing insight into the politics and society of Russia and Turkey.
The extraordinary story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, the son of former slaves who fled America to build a life in Tsarist Russia.
'A fascinating tale' Anne Applebaum
'Thoroughly enjoyable' Spectator
'Extraordinary and gripping' Adam Hochschild
After the brutal death of his father when he was a teenager, Frederick Thomas fled the stifling racism of the American South and headed for New York City, where he worked as a valet and trained as a singer. Through charisma and cunning, Thomas emigrated to Europe, where his acquired skills as a multilingual maitre d'hotel allowed him to travel from London to Monte CarloâŚ
The Romanov saga has intrigued me since I was an undergraduate student in history many moons ago. Three hundred years of Romanov rule were filled with exotic beauty, violence, and tragedy. I went on to teach Russian history at university and was able to share some of the stories of the tsars and tsarinas with my students. Having authored books and articles in my academic field, my teaching career has ended. Now it is historical fiction that has captured my imagination and spurred me to pen my own novels set in 19th-century Africa and Afghanistan, as well as Russia during the reign of Ivan the Terrible.
Rutherford's Russka was the first novel about Russia that I read nearly thirty years ago, and its descriptions and plotting still resonates. Through the lens of four families divided by ethnicity, the book sweeps the reader from Russia's Slavic origins to the Bolshevik Revolution. The chapter in which Tsar Ivan the Terrible plays a major role is especially riveting. What impressed me the most was how the author crafted a story of Russian rule and culture spanning 1,800 years and its impact on the characters.Â
In this vast and gorgeous tapestry of a novel, serf and master, Cossack and tsar, priest and Jew are brought together in a family saga which unrolls through centuries of history to reveal that most impenetrable and mysterious of lands - Russia. Through the life of a little town east of Moscow in the Russian heartland, Edward Rutherfurd creates a sweeping family saga from the baffling contradictions of Russia's culture and her peoples - bleak yet exotic, brutal but romantic, land of ritual yet riddled with superstitious fears. From Russia's dawn and the cruel Tatar invasions to Ivan the TerribleâŚ
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man sheâŚ
As an ethnographer, I have been studying the lives of ordinary women in socialist and post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe for over twenty-five years. I have always been fascinated by the differences in womenâs life options in the presence or absence of robust social safety nets. As a scholar, Iâve spent decades working in archives and interviewing people across the region, and I have written eight books about the various gendered experiences of everyday life in Eastern Europe. As a professor, I have taught a course called âSex and Socialism,â almost every year for eighteen years and I am always reading widely in this field to look for new material for my syllabi.
This deeply researched book explores the massive upheavals that followed the Bolshevik Revolution in the young Soviet Union. By mining a rich body of archival research, Goldman reveals just how radical Soviet policies to emancipate women really were in their historical context. More importantly, she uncovers the heated debates that characterized this early period of Soviet history before the rigidity and paranoia of Stalinism takes over and he reverses many of the early gains.
When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they believed that under socialism the family would 'wither away.' They envisioned a society in which communal dining halls, daycare centres, and public laundries would replace the unpaid labour of women in the home. Yet by 1936 legislation designed to liberate women from their legal and economic dependence had given way to increasingly conservative solutions aimed at strengthening traditional family ties and women's reproductive role. This book explains the reversal, focusing on how women, peasants, and orphans responded to Bolshevik attempts to remake the family, and how their opinions and experiences inâŚ
Growing up during the Cold War, I became interested in Communism early. I read about how the Communist International worked to spread the world revolution. Despite its Eurocentrism, Communism appealed to people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. However, it failed to make meaningful inroads in the Middle East. I wanted to know why. When I trained to become a historian, my curiosity turned towards the Arab world. I decided to combine my two interests and research the history of Arab Communist movements. I discovered a fascinating world of firebrand activists struggling against the tide of nationalism, fascism, and religious bigotry. I hope you find these books as gripping as I did.
This is the go-to book for the early Communist movement in Iran. Unlike the Arab countries of the Middle East, where Communism slowly spread in the early decades of the twentieth century, Iran experienced Communism as Soviet foreign policy in a direct manner. Bordering the Soviet Union, northern Iran was the subject of early attempts to spread the Communist creed in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Zabihâs book tells the story of those early inroads and the Iranian activists supporting the new ideology. The early attempts failed, but by the 1940s, the Communist Tudeh Party had emerged as a popular mass party. Zabihâs narrative is lucid, and his research is based on Soviet and Iranian materials.Â
History has always been my passion. Since I was 16, I tried to understand the world around me and the forces that shaped it. I thought that history as a discipline provided the best answers. In the 1970s, because of the official anti-Semitism, it was impossible to get into the history department programs at the Soviet universities. Nonetheless, I resolved to study history after my emigration to the US in 1979 and joined a graduate program at the University of Chicago. For four decades I have been writing about Russian history, although I also read, teach, and write on global history.
Beautifully written, the book follows the lives of Russiaâs two great aristocratic families in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Their fate was typical of the entire Russian aristocracy. It is a story of the Bolsheviks' cruelty and a painful survival of their many victims.
The riveting and harrowing story of the Russian nobility caught in the upheaval of the Revolution
Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Kansas City Star and Salon
Epic in scope, precise in detail, and heartbreaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the aristocracy caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin's Russia. It is the story of how a centuries-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the tsar and empire, andâŚ
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the worldâs most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the bookâŚ
I am a modern British historian who loves to read thrillers and non-fiction histories of spies. Iâve done it all my adult life. Moreover, Iâve always been fascinated by the Russian Revolution: its early idealism, the curdling of idealism. When the daughter of Moura von Benckendorff, (R.H. Bruce Lockhartâs great love) told me about her mother and Lockhart, I realized I had an opportunity to combine my vocation and my avocation. The result is my book, The Lockhart Plot.
And finally, this is Lockhartâs own recounting of his adventures in Russia during 1917-18. He was a liar, but the cameos he provides are brilliant, e.g. of Cheka leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky: âhe never blinks, he never smiles.â Here it is, from the horseâs mouth: complete with descriptions of revolutionary Petrograd, and clandestine meetings with counter-revolutionaries, and shootouts with police, and above all, the torrid romance he conducted with alluring, mysterious Moura von Benckendorff, who may have been a spy herself.Â
This extraordinary book, which I obtained through the Folio Society, is compiled from the personal daily journals of a British diplomat and emissary who was in Russia from 1905 through 1918. He was personally acquainted with many of the principal participants in the Bolshevik Revolution, including Trotsky, whom he visitied almost daily in the early stages of that event, and even Lenin. His eye-witness accounts of many of the events surrounding the entire history of this cataclismic tranformation of Russia from a Tsarist Empire into a Soviet one is like no other. It is in the first person throughout, andâŚ
