Here are 64 books that Making a Real Killing fans have personally recommended if you like
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Fresh out of journalism school I stumbled on a strike at a machine shop in Pilsen, a neighborhood once home to Chicago’s most famous labor struggles, by then becoming a hip gentrified enclave. Drinking steaming atole with Polish, Mexican, and Puerto Rican workers in a frigid Chicago winter, I was captivated by the solidarity and determination to fight for their jobs and rights, in what appeared to be a losing battle. After covering labor struggles by Puerto Rican teachers, Mexican miners, Colombian bottlers, Chicago warehouse workers, and many others, my enthusiasm for such stories is constantly reignited -- by the workers fighting against all odds and the writers telling their stories, including those featured here.
This gripping, cinematic tale of a watershed workplace disaster immerses you in the grueling, gritty world of young immigrant – Jewish and Italian – women workers in early-20th century New York City. The horrific fire in a shirt-waist factory saw workers jumping to their deaths, revealing that “a huge and vulnerable world existed far above the street.” It created a cauldron of outrage and empathy, bare-knuckle politics, and leftist ideology leading to reform. You most remember the gumption and survival instinct of these young women, far from home without even the right to vote, coming together in the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and making history.
Describes the devastating 1911 fire that destroyed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York's Greenwich Village, the deaths of 146 workers in the fire, the Jewish and Italian immigrants, mostly women, who made up the majority of the victims, and the implications of the catastrophe on twentieth-ce
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Fresh out of journalism school I stumbled on a strike at a machine shop in Pilsen, a neighborhood once home to Chicago’s most famous labor struggles, by then becoming a hip gentrified enclave. Drinking steaming atole with Polish, Mexican, and Puerto Rican workers in a frigid Chicago winter, I was captivated by the solidarity and determination to fight for their jobs and rights, in what appeared to be a losing battle. After covering labor struggles by Puerto Rican teachers, Mexican miners, Colombian bottlers, Chicago warehouse workers, and many others, my enthusiasm for such stories is constantly reignited -- by the workers fighting against all odds and the writers telling their stories, including those featured here.
In the early 1990s, Decatur, Illinois was a “time-battered” town, in the words of indefatigable labor journalist Steve Franklin, where factories hunkered amid grungy bars, a forlorn old motel, and prison. Unions had largely capitulated to global capital, as wages and jobs were slashed across the industrial heartland and families suffered in silence. In Decatur workers made a last stand at three eponymous employers – Firestone, Staley, and Caterpillar. Franklin – at the Chicago Tribune, one of the last labor journalists nationwide -- brings us evocatively to the front lines of these three strikes, weaving accessible socioeconomic analysis through the landscape of a bittersweet Bruce Springsteen song.
This eloquently written book chronicles the massive, protracted strikes waged against three large corporations in Decatur, Illinois, in the 1990s. Veteran journalist Stephen Franklin shows how labor disputes at Bridgestone/ Firestone, Caterpillar, and A. E. Staley left lasting scars on this town and its citizens--and marked a turning point in American labor history. When workers went on strike to retain such basic rights as job security and the 8-hour day, the corporations hit back with unprecedented hard-line tactics. Through the moving stories of individual workers and union activists, Franklin illuminates the hardships and disillusionment left in the wake of the…
Fresh out of journalism school I stumbled on a strike at a machine shop in Pilsen, a neighborhood once home to Chicago’s most famous labor struggles, by then becoming a hip gentrified enclave. Drinking steaming atole with Polish, Mexican, and Puerto Rican workers in a frigid Chicago winter, I was captivated by the solidarity and determination to fight for their jobs and rights, in what appeared to be a losing battle. After covering labor struggles by Puerto Rican teachers, Mexican miners, Colombian bottlers, Chicago warehouse workers, and many others, my enthusiasm for such stories is constantly reignited -- by the workers fighting against all odds and the writers telling their stories, including those featured here.
The name “Detroit” too often conjures images of poverty-porn: gorgeously crumbling buildings, post-apocalyptic urban decay, lost souls wandering cracked streets. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying shatters this image with unfettered energy. It chronicles the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the auto plants of the 1960s-1970s, a refreshing reminder of the power of intersectional labor organizing; a raw look at the racism of the mainstream labor movement; and a very human chronicle of the struggles and flaws of courageous everyday workers at this critical time and place in history.
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying tracks the extraordinary development of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as they became two of the landmark political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely heralded as one the most important books on the black liberation movement.
Marvin Surkin received his PhD in political science from New York University and is a specialist in comparative urban politics and social change. He worked at the center of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit.
Dan Georgakas is a writer, historian, and activist with a long-time interest…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
Fresh out of journalism school I stumbled on a strike at a machine shop in Pilsen, a neighborhood once home to Chicago’s most famous labor struggles, by then becoming a hip gentrified enclave. Drinking steaming atole with Polish, Mexican, and Puerto Rican workers in a frigid Chicago winter, I was captivated by the solidarity and determination to fight for their jobs and rights, in what appeared to be a losing battle. After covering labor struggles by Puerto Rican teachers, Mexican miners, Colombian bottlers, Chicago warehouse workers, and many others, my enthusiasm for such stories is constantly reignited -- by the workers fighting against all odds and the writers telling their stories, including those featured here.
Despite so much depressing evidence to the contrary, professor Robert Ovetz argues that global workers' struggle is being reborn from the ashes of the old trade union movement. In this collection, international labor experts explain how Argentine truckers, Puerto Rican teachers, Chinese migrant laborers, Turkish delivery drivers, and other workers are analyzing geopolitical dynamics and seizing the levers of power in new and effective ways. Packed with analysis and charts like the “Credible Strike Threats Scorecard,” this is a gold mine for labor geeks who refuse to give up hope of overturning global capitalism.
Rumours of the death of the global labour movement have been greatly exaggerated. Rising from the ashes of the old trade union movement, workers' struggle is being reborn from below.
By engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers' inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying their working conditions, the technical composition of capital, and how to recompose their own power in order to devise new tactics, strategies, organisational forms and objectives. These workers' inquiries, from call centre workers to teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energising unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers' organisations.
Nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to human society. Their huge cost robs people in poverty of essential services and support. Since 1981 when I joined a 6700-mile walk across the U.S. and nine other countries to Bethlehem, I have campaigned for disarmament, uncovered extensive deception about their production, and advocated for the millions of people harmed by the radiation released from the production and testing of nuclear weapons. I long for the day when we will not have to live in fear of a nuclear Armageddon.
Iverson’s memoir mirrors my own experience of growing up near nuclear weapons sites, only to find out later the dangers we were exposed to as children.
Iverson grew up near the Rocky Flats plant outside of Denver. It machined plutonium produced at Hanford into the cores of U.S. nuclear weapons. As she dug into the secret history of Rocky Flats, she uncovers family secrets—eerily like my own memoir.
“An intimate and deeply human memoir that shows why we should all be concerned about nuclear safety, and the dangers of ignoring science in the name of national security.”—Rebecca Skloot, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
A shocking account of the government’s attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic waste released by a secret nuclear weapons plant in Colorado and a community’s vain search for justice—soon to be a feature documentary
Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated…
I suppose it began at age 10 as a transplant to Southern California from Minnesota. That awkward transition begged for an escape, and I found it in the supernatural. I watched the original Twilight Zones, tore through The Chronicles of Narnia one summer, discovered Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, and then picked up a pen and wrote. Creating new worlds became a calling. Then life and adulting got in the way, as they do, but over time, I’ve written three novels dealing with the supernatural. They’re the books I would have loved as a kid. They’re a leap into my head—care to try? It’ll be fun, he says.
History and the supernatural are my literary biscuits and gravy—it doesn’t come around often, but I readily devour it when offered. (Well, now I’m hungry, dang it.) I haven’t often encountered a tale like this featuring an abandoned mining town (thus the book’s title) that isn’t exactly abandoned. I could tell things weren’t going to go well in this novel, but like a gawker at a car accident, I went ahead and looked anyway. I’m really glad I did.
I loved the premise of a crew investigating an abandoned mining town. Folks, I can’t think of many uglier places to have lived in history than a mining town, and that’s bound to leave some residue. Needless to say, the setting was amazing, and the action was intense. A setting like that is begging for the supernatural to come out, and yes, it does.
On Christmas Day in 1893, every man, woman and child in a remote gold mining town disappeared, belongings forsaken, meals left to freeze in vacant cabins; and not a single bone was ever found. One hundred and thirteen years later, two backcountry guides are hired by a history professor and his journalist daughter to lead them into the abandoned mining town so that they can learn what happened. With them is a psychic, and a paranormal photographer - as the town is rumoured to be haunted. A party that tried to explore the town years ago was never heard from…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I am the mother of six and a voracious journaler. I am also a novelist. Though I’ve found that the facts of family adventures are often more fascinating than fiction. I bring in-the-moment observations as well as decade-seasoned insights to the world of family life. I also love reading about other families with all their quirks and joys.
I highly recommend this book to every parent. It is filled with gentle, practical wisdom in the setting of a frontier family. The father takes the time to teach through everyday experience and vivid analogies. We use his analogy of the “character house” all the time in our family. The mother has her own quiet strength, which the author shows more in the following books of the series. The book is also filled with the high energy and pranks of children, and the adventures of growing up on a ranch. A lovely true story, though be warned, you will cry at the end.
Ralph Moody was eight years old in 1906 when his family moved from New Hampshire to a Colorado ranch. Through his eyes we experience the pleasures and perils of ranching there early in the twentieth century. Auctions and roundups, family picnics, irrigation wars, tornadoes and wind storms give authentic color to Little Britches. So do adventures, wonderfully told, that equip Ralph to take his father's place when it becomes necessary. Little Britches was the literary debut of Ralph Moody, who wrote about the adventures of his family in eight glorious books, all available as Bison Books. Purchase the audio edition.
I am the grandson of a political refugee. My grandfather was a gunrunner in the Greek resistance to Turkish occupation of Chios prior to the 1st Balkan War. His guerilla activity placed his life in danger. He fled pursuit by the Turks, which led to his eventual emigration to the United States. From childhood my family experience was of lively discussions that were inflected by my grandfather’s experience of resistance and US citizenship. They sparked my fascination with the role of citizen voices in a democracy. That was a main focus of my academic career, teaching rhetoric for more than 40 years at Penn State University and the University of Colorado Boulder.
Perhaps the most widespread engagement by ordinary citizens in political relations is with the education of their children. School boards are increasingly regarded as a site of passionate political contest over what our children will learn, especially when it comes to learning history and its consequences for their understanding of their community and nation. Challenges of Ordinary Democracy reports on three years in the life of a local school board. The voices of administrators, teachers, parents, and the press are examined when dissent takes center stage in the school board’s deliberations. Given that ordinary citizens will disagree, often vehemently, Tracy asks us to consider the parameters of reasonable hostility and why reasonable hostility is important for the voices of ordinary citizens to matter in deciding issues that affect their lives.
Is there any place in America where passionate debate plays a more vital role in democratic discourse than local school board meetings? Karen Tracy conducted a thirty-five-month study of the board meetings of the Boulder Valley School District between 1996 and 1999 to analyze just how democracy operates in practice. In Challenges of Ordinary Democracy, she reveals the major role that emotion plays in real-life debate and discerns value in what might easily be seen as negative forms of discourse-voicing platitudes, making contradictory assertions, arguing over a document's wording, speaking angrily, attacking a person's character. By illuminating this one arena…
I am a teacher of Native American skills in the mountains of north Georgia. Each day when I leave my house to enter the forest, I am keenly aware that I am stepping on land that once “belonged” to the Cherokee. Everything around me in the forest was intimately known and used by the original people, and these same items have become the critical tools in my own life. I know the Cherokee history, and I know the white man’s history. I believe the clash of these two cultures deserves to be told in full.
I consider this one of the best novels that demonstrates the clash of two cultures that fairly defines the history of our American West. Both sides are examined to reveal the opposing motives of whites and Indians.
The good and the bad emerge on each side of the equation. Almost everything in the book is based on actual events in order to give the reader a sense of history while he/she is entertained by a good story.
Written to commemorate the Bicentennial in 1976, James A. Michener’s magnificent saga of the Westis an enthralling celebration of the frontier. Brimming with the glory of America’s past, the story of Colorado—the Centennial State—is manifested through its people: Lame Beaver, the Arapaho chieftain and warrior, and his Comanche and Pawnee enemies; Levi Zendt, fleeing with his child bride from the Amish country; the cowboy, Jim Lloyd, who falls in love with a wealthy and cultured Englishwoman, Charlotte Seccombe. In Centennial, trappers, traders, homesteaders, gold seekers, ranchers, and hunters are brought together in the dramatic conflicts that shape the…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
We are twin brothers that like climbing mountains and peakbagging around the world. Our goal is to climb the highest mountain in every country on earth, and we’ve so far gotten up the highpoints of 139 countries out of 196 total. We got started doing long bicycle tours in Europe climbing country highpoints on the cheap after graduate school at MIT. Recently we've climbed some of the most difficult country highpoints in the world like Pik Pobeda (24,406ft), the Kyrgyzstan highpoint, Noshaq (24,580ft), the Afghanistan highpoint, and K2 (28,261ft), the Pakistan highpoint.
Gerry Roach has climbed extensively in Colorado and has done a great job compiling his wealth of first-hand knowledge into this guidebook. This is the best resource we know of for climbing all the 14,000ft peaks in Colorado, and it was our main resource when climbing these peaks. He gives very detailed color-coded route maps, and describes a half dozen different route options for each peak. This is a must-have book if you are hiking and peak-bagging in Colorado.
Standard, alternate, and technical routes for all 58 Colorado Fourteener peaks
A classic guidebook known for its accuracy and comprehensiveness, Colorado's Fourteeners has been updated for this thirtieth anniversary edition to include GPS coordinates, revised topographic maps, expanded route details, and new descriptions reflecting alterations to trail access. Besides the often-climbed standard routes, the guide describes many alternative and technical routes.
The trusted source for over 30 years, this is the guide to bring with you to peaks websites can't reach.
