Here are 100 books that The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes fans have personally recommended if you like
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
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I’m a medieval historian, and I’ve written academic books and articles about the history of the medieval world, but I have also written two historical novels. I became interested in history in general and the Middle Ages in particular from reading historical fiction as a child (Jean Plaidy!). The past is another country, and visiting it through fiction is an excellent way to get a feel for it, for its values, norms, and cultures, for how it is different from and similar to our own age. I’ve chosen novels that I love that do this especially well, and bring to light less well-known aspects of the Middle Ages.
It is difficult to imagine a list of great novels about the Middle Ages that does not include this book.
I read it first when I was in graduate school, and it brought so much of what I was studying to life – the monastic world of its setting with all its contradictions and spectacular architecture; fights over religion and the true nature of spirituality; the non-linear nature of medieval literature.
I love how it can be read on one level as a page-turny murder mystery and on another as a post-modern novel that explores the nature of signs and meaning. Its mystificatory preface reveals the distance between the medieval world and what we can say about it.
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective.
William collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I vividly recall learning about public libraries as a kid: if I signed up for a library card I could take ANY of these books home to read?! From the first, I loved books as physical objects on library shelves—savoring their covers and carefully reading their spines as clues to the stories within. I ended up as a professor of literature who does not just study the words, or texts, of novels (my specialty), but how stories are made into books and circulate in the culture. Everything from graphic design to price can influence our interpretation of a story, even before we read the first word...
I love this utterly unexpected book for its deadpan humor, animated prose, and strange and wondrous facts about the horror-filled history of libraries and the humans who run these book depositories. That CIA-trained librarians, a mere few decades ago, guillotined newspapers and books in the worship of microfilm is an incredibly painful truth in today’s digital age.
Baker’s outrage is palpable, and yet he made me laugh out loud on almost every nerdy page. I’m jealous of his way of speaking. I put this one on syllabi whenever I can.
The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But for fifty years our country’s libraries–including the Library of Congress–have been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age.
With meticulous detective work and Baker’s well-known explanatory power, Double Fold reveals a secret history of microfilm lobbyists, former CIA agents, and warehouses where priceless archives are destroyed with a machine called a guillotine. Baker argues passionately for…
I vividly recall learning about public libraries as a kid: if I signed up for a library card I could take ANY of these books home to read?! From the first, I loved books as physical objects on library shelves—savoring their covers and carefully reading their spines as clues to the stories within. I ended up as a professor of literature who does not just study the words, or texts, of novels (my specialty), but how stories are made into books and circulate in the culture. Everything from graphic design to price can influence our interpretation of a story, even before we read the first word...
I love the grit and heroism of this story about the history of the humble Armed Services Editions. My own university holds one of the largest collections of these small wartime reprints that were sized to fit into the pocket of a GI’s uniform.
So, I initially reached for this book out of duty but then relished it for its compelling historical facts and vividly bookish humanity.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. While the Nazis were burning hundreds of millions of books across Europe, America printed and shipped 140 million books to its troops. The "heartwarming" story of how an army of librarians and publishers lifted spirits and built a new democratic audience of readers is as inspiring today as it was then (New York Times).
When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations.
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…
I vividly recall learning about public libraries as a kid: if I signed up for a library card I could take ANY of these books home to read?! From the first, I loved books as physical objects on library shelves—savoring their covers and carefully reading their spines as clues to the stories within. I ended up as a professor of literature who does not just study the words, or texts, of novels (my specialty), but how stories are made into books and circulate in the culture. Everything from graphic design to price can influence our interpretation of a story, even before we read the first word...
I love how every little detail of every surviving copy of the famous Gutenberg Bible (a binding, illuminations, a bit of marginalia, etc.) is investigated for clues to its monastic first owners, the book’s travels, and repairs. The chapters read like episodes of CSI.
Yes, my university owns a Gutenberg copy, so this started as another duty read but ended in true love. A big expensive book about the first big expensive book better be good, right? Well, this one is better than good—it is a tour of the force of book sleuthing. I fetishize the illustrations and how this book, cleverly, is roughly the size of a Gutenberg volume.
The Gutenberg Bible is widely recognized as Europe's first printed book, a book that forever changed the world. However, despite its initial impact, fame was fleeting: for the better part of three centuries the Bible was virtually forgotten; only after two centuries of tenacious and contentious scholarship did it attain its iconic status as a monument of human invention. Editio princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible is the first book to tell the whole story of Europe's first printed edition, describing its creation at Mainz circa 1455, its impact on fifteenth-century life and religion, its fall into oblivion during…
I am a lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. I write regularly on popular music and culture in scholarly form and as a critic in various publications. I am convinced that popular music can gesture at utopia despite its emergence from within a capitalist market society.
Sometimes, the analytical frame of a book completely changes one’s understanding of a phenomenon, and that was the case with this history of work song.
By showing that singing and music-making at work were silenced in the latter half of the 19th century by the noise of machines and the discipline of factory bosses, Korczynski et. al. provided me with a wholly new way to understand the function of music in an industrialized capitalist society: in terms of the segregation of labor and leisure.
Whether for weavers at the handloom, labourers at the plough or factory workers on the assembly line, music has often been a key texture in people's working lives. This book is the first to explore the rich history of music at work in Britain and charts the journey from the singing cultures of pre-industrial occupations, to the impact and uses of the factory radio, via the silencing effect of industrialisation. The first part of the book discusses how widespread cultures of singing at work were in pre-industrial manual occupations. The second and third parts of the book show how musical…
I grew up in a strong Scots–speaking environment just before the advent of television, so very much a Scottish village rather than the global village. Speaking several foreign languages and being able to study Scots language and literature at Edinburgh University gave me confidence and the realisation of how special Scots was, and how closely it is tied to the identity of the people and the land. The book is local, national, and international in outlook and is written from the heart and soul, with a strong influence of the Democratic Intellect thrown in to balance the passion. You can also hear me reading the book on Audible.
Another fine novel by a great writer who, like me, hailed from Ayrshire. I quote from it in my book. I became aware of William McIlvanney when I attended Kilmarnock Academy between 1967 and 1969 and his first novel Remedy is None was passed around the students in their final year at the school, before heading for University. Having a living, breathing novelist living in the town was really something, and it made us all think that perhaps we could become writers too! All of his books are excellent but Docherty touched me personally because it describes a mining community, similar to the town I grew up in, Galston. It also explores the linguistic tension between Scots and English which is the experience of most people growing up in the Lowlands of Scotland.
'His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.'
Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his small town. But the world is changing, and, lying next to him, Conn's father Tam has decided that his son's life will be different from his own.
Gritty, dark and tender, McIlvanney's Docherty is a modern classic.
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
Curious about Ancient Rome and especially about gladiators, I asked myself, who were the backstage team of the Colosseum? The more I searched for the team, the more I realised there was hardly any mention of them. If there were hundreds of animals, dancers, singers, gladiators, criminals, and more about to be shown off to an audience of 60,000, who was planning and managing it all? And so I created the Colosseum’s backstage team – a retired centurion called Marcus and his scribe Althea, along with a motley crew of slaves, a prostitute, a street boy, even a retired Vestal Virgin… they came alive for me while researching and I eventually created a four-book series.
A superb title and an irresistible page-turner. I could have filled whole novels with the jobs described here. Each role was interesting in its own right but also collectively built up really interesting cultural insights. A very strong sense of daily life in all its fun and messiness and a brilliant book to engage not just adults but (with a bit of redaction!) older kids too.
Vicki Le?n, the popular author of the Uppity Women series (more than 335,000 in print), has turned her impressive writing and research skills to the entertaining and unusual array of the peculiar jobs, prized careers and passionate pursuits of ancient Greece and Rome.
From Architect to Vicarius (a deputy or stand-in)-and everything in between-Working IX to V introduces readers to the most unique (dream incubator), most courageous (elephant commander), and even the most ordinary (postal worker) jobs of the ancient world. Vicki Le?n brought a light and thoughtful touch to women's history in her earlier books, and she brings the…
I have an unusual personal history. I majored in math in college and aspired to a life as a scientist. However, the civil rights movement and other events of the 1960s and 1970s inspired me to switch and earn a doctorate in sociology. (Which considers itself a science.) My first faculty position, at Yale beginning in 1972, involved a joint appointment in the Sociology Department and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, which focused on public policy. During the remainder of my career I have worked and published together with economists and sought to do research that uses the perspectives of both fields.
Sociologist Cherlin was one of the earliest researchers to become aware of the importance of how, during the second half of the 20th century, during the computer revolution when skill demands of jobs were increasing, the job market collapsed for workers without a college education.
Without a stable job paying a living wage, men and women without a 4-year college education could not see their way to a stable marriage that prepared children for school and life success. This decimated blue-collar families, and led to "culture wars," and working-class resentment of college-educated elites.
Many of these less-educated individuals have left their traditional place in the Democratic party, and come to form Trump's and the Republican's voting base.
Two generations ago, young men and women with only a high-school degree would have entered the plentiful industrial occupations which then sustained the middle-class ideal of a male-breadwinner family. Such jobs have all but vanished over the past forty years, and in their absence ever-growing numbers of young adults now hold precarious, low-paid jobs with few fringe benefits. Facing such insecure economic prospects, less-educated young adults are increasingly forgoing marriage and are having children within unstable cohabiting relationships. This has created a large marriage gap between them and their more affluent, college-educated peers. In Labor’s Love Lost, noted sociologist Andrew…
My passion for visions and pathways to a better world is based on three main cornerstones: (1) The discontent with the current state of affairs in our immediate cultural environment as well as in geopolitics. (2) My belief is that successful action needs visions, including scientific visions. (3) The experience that visions interact with their Implementation; they actually live by being put into (partial) existence. And since we are all parts of the same biological species, we are able to develop also via writing and reading.
In 2011, I spent a semester in London; I had arranged to meet Eric Hobsbawm, the famous historian whom I adored. Unfortunately, he was too ill when I arrived and died before I could meet him. In this book he did not only surprise me with his insight into episodes of rebellions and revolutions, what is even more scintillating is that he mixes all that with the evolving emergence of the particular world of jazz.
Rarely a personality with such broad scientific knowledge has managed to be so uncommonly common in its very specific empathy for a particular cultural obsession. The book shows how important it is to walk on two feet: The ordinary animal within its species and the extraordinary scientific observer, letting his spirit fly above singular events.
These 26 essays range over the history of working men and women between the late18th century and the present day. They include Hobsbawm's pioneering studies in labour history and social protest - the formation of the British workin class, labour custom and traditions, the political radicalism of 19th century shoemakers, male and female images in revolutionary movements, the machine-breakers, revolution and sex, peasants and politics, the rules of violence, the common-sense of Tom Paine. There are more recent reflections: on the May Day holiday; the Vietnam War; socialism and the avantgarde; Mario Puzo, the Mafia and the Sicilian bandit Salvatore…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
Though I was born in the U.S., I didn’t wind up living here full-time till I was almost 10. The result? I have always been curious about what it means to be an American. In one way or another, the books on my list explore that question. More than that, all (well, nearly all) insist that black history is inextricably intertwined with American history and that American culture is a mulatto culture, a fusion of black and white. After years of making my living as a journalist, editor, and book reviewer, I left newspapers to write fiction and non-fiction, exploring these and other questions.
I still remember reading James Alan McPherson’s book for the first time. I was a senior in high school, one of a handful of black students in what had been an all-white private school. I closed the book, thinking, “Finally. Somebody understands.”
Like me, McPherson had gone from an all-black school, college in his case, to a majority-white school, in his case, Harvard Law. He began to write fiction there. It was the mid-1960s, but instead of hewing to familiar tropes of the time, black student unrest, black self-segregation, and black victimhood, McPherson cast an unflinching eye on blacks and whites interacting for the first time as equals.
He also depicted blacks in their own world lovingly but without sentimentality. I knew these people. McPherson taught me to see and appreciate them afresh.
The classic debut collection from Pulitzer Prize winner James Alan McPherson
Hue and Cry is the remarkably mature and agile debut story collection from James Alan McPherson, one of America’s most venerated and most original writers. McPherson’s characters -- gritty, authentic, and pristinely rendered -- give voice to unheard struggles along the dividing lines of race and poverty in subtle, fluid prose that bears no trace of sentimentality, agenda, or apology.
First published in 1968, this collection includes the Atlantic Prize-winning story “Gold Coast” (selected by John Updike for the collection Best American Short Stories of the Century). Now with…
