100 Books Like No Duty to Retreat

This is a classic work of environmental history, an exploration of not only the growth of Chicago but the inextricable links between the city and its countryside.

Today, there’s an even sharper distinction between the food producers who live in rural areas and the food consumers who live everywhere else, politically as well as economically, and it’s not always clear who’s making the bigger mess. But this is an essential book about the rise of Big Ag and its impact on the landscape.

We tend to remember the railroad tycoons of the late 1800s in one of two ways–good or bad.

In the first, we imagine the Vanderbilts, Stanfords, and Goulds as the brilliant architects of the modern economy, “The Men Who Built America”–to quote the History Channel show. In the second, we imagine them as unscrupulous robber barons, evil geniuses who created the unequal corporate America that we still live in today. But what if both explanations give the railroad men far too much credit and responsibility?

In Richard White’s scathing and often hilarious book, he showcases these larger-than-life figures as bumbling, corrupt, and often bringing ruin and bankruptcy to their shareholders. They weren’t the mighty octopus we remember, but “a group of fat men in an octopus suit,” whose “tentacles of steel were as likely to be slapping at each other.”

The iconic mythology of the American Wild West–of cowboys and Indians, sunset shootouts, one-horse frontier towns–wasn’t something created after this tumultuous period of history, but actually during it. And no single figure of the day did more to popularize these images than William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a scout and showman who became one of the most famous people on earth in the late 1800s.

Historian Louis Warren's mind-blowing biography of Cody shows this larger-than-life figure as a bundle of contradictions. Here’s just one example. By our standards today, Cody’s glorification of white settlers pushing aside Native inhabitants would be revolting and racist. But the showman employed hundreds of Lakota Sioux in his Wild West show, even including Sitting Bull–the same man who had earlier defeated Custer at Little Bighorn. 

I can’t tell you how often I hear people talking about an Old West–an era imagined as distinct from a New West that followed. Spoiler alert–that makes no sense. No author does a better job blowing up this fantasy than Patty Limerick, who argues that there’s a single throughline in Western history–that of conquest by external forces, usually the federal government or big businesses from Wall Street.

You’ll never think of the West in the same after reading this powerful book.

On May 8, 1970, just days after the killing of four college students at Kent State University, construction workers in New York City violently attacked a group that had gathered to protest the Vietnam War.

Kuhn offers a riveting account of the events (dubbed the “Hardhat Riot” by some and “Workers’ Woodstock” by others), but he also situates them into a broader story of how the war and other developments of the 1960s exacerbated divisions within the Democratic Party between white, heavily unionized blue-collar workers in the urban North and an emerging class of college-educated professionals. 

Nixon successfully courted many of the blue-collar workers on the way to his landslide victory in 1972. Kuhn is no apologist for the workers, but he also avoids facile stereotypes about the white working class, some of which persist to this day.  

Welcome to Hard Times is a shorter novel. It is of the length of the classic western that was popular at the time that this novel came out (1960). This novel is sometimes described as an anti-western or an ironic western, as it takes a non-heroic view of people dealing with evil in a frontier town. It was made into a movie by the same title, but the movie is not well known. The novel is similar in tone to the movie McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which some people do not like because of its non-heroic or skeptical tone. Readers who like their westerns upbeat and unequivocal may not appreciate Doctorow’s novel, but readers who are willing to consider less-than-pristine views may find an interesting treatment here.

Rebecca and Russell Dobash had studied men's violence against their female partners for decades and were already heroes of the women's movement when they began interviewing incarcerated killers in Britain. Two fine books have resulted, one focused on men who killed women, the other on men who killed men. It is the former, especially the section on intimate partner homicide, that I find most captivating. The Dobashes skilfully blend national statistics with the self-serving testimony of their interviewees, who minimize their lethal acts as things that "happened" rather than things that they did, and apparently believe themselves to be the victims. These insights are essential.    

Starting with the public claim that Canadian society exhibits social indifference to the racialized and gendered violence connected to murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, Granzow interrogates the presumed absence suggested the word indifference, showing that it hides something present and active: a social investment and authorization of this violence as part of the maintenance of the settler-colonial state.

Looking at the city of Edmonton historically, ways that this investment – or commitment – has materialized are elaborated, including a policing initiative (Project Kare) that collects demographic information on individuals expected to be subject to (colonial) violence and the former Charles Camsell Hospital that incarcerated Indigenous peoples from where many disappeared. This impacted my thinking on the contradictions inherent to the notion of care and the place I call home.

When I was thinking about the second book I wrote in my trilogy, I knew I had to learn about violence, particularly violence in prison. What causes it, its impact, and why some people hurt themselves in prison. My brother recommended James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist, and his insights and understanding of it shaped the central character in my book. It’s troubling but fascinating reading for anyone who’s interested in understanding this.

Most people’s idea of lynching is the sanitized version that they have picked up from movies and TV. However, the practice of lynching, as it was carried out in the United States from the late 19th to well into the 20th century, was far more hideous than a few people hanging a man from a tree. This classic contribution concentrates on spectacle lynchings. These were public lynchings attended by hundreds or even thousands of spectators. They involved hours of torture and bodily mutilation, often culminating in the victim being burned alive. Lynching and Spectacle is a vital read for anyone wishing to understand the full horror of American Racism.