Books like To Change the World

I still vividly remember the first time I read this book in my teenage years in Tehran. Its powerful rhythm, its vivid political imagery, and its sweeping vision shook me. It caught me right then and has never quite let go.

Not only has it remained relevant throughout the years, but it still reads like the literary masterpiece that it is. 

Hobsbawm was both one of the most influential professional historians of the twentieth century and a lifelong communist. As a historian, Hobsbawm had no illusions about the failures of twentieth-century communist regimes. His life story illustrates how a commitment to communism entailed far more than an endorsement of Stalin or the Soviet Union. A schoolboy in Berlin when the Nazis came to power, Hobsbawm, associated communism with antifascism. In his autobiography, he offers not a confession or a justification for his membership in the communist party, but an effort to explain what he calls the “wars of secular religion” that devastated so much of the twentieth century.

Rae Yang offers a moving and sometimes harrowing account of how a privileged child of Chinese Communist Party elites became during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s a member of the Red Guards, and, in the aftermath of the revolution, a pig tender on a farm in the remote northern wilderness. Ultimately, she emigrated to the United States and became a professor of East Asian studies. In this beautifully written memoir, Yang recovers her youthful idealism and offers an unsparing assessment of the consequences for China, her family, and herself of the desire for revolutionary heroism. 

The Communist Experience is a vast and kaleidoscopic collection of primary sources that range from a fragment of the memoir of a Russian worker who became a Bolshevik before the 1917 revolution to letters from Spanish children evacuated to the USSR during the Spanish Civil War to the manifesto of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Cuba. Young organizes the collection around themes that cross-national and temporal borders, such as “children of the revolution” “state violence and repression,” and “leisure, entertainment sports, and travel.” The book can be read from cover to cover, but also rewards readers who dip into sections or personal stories according to their interests.

At the end of February 1942, British-born journalist Alistair Cooke set off upon a road trip across wartime America, to “see what the war had done to people.” His observations provide a series of fascinating snapshots of the home front in the early months of the war. Shortages of civilian goods showed up everywhere, from the West Virginia soda fountain with the forlorn sign over an orange-squeezer that read, “Regret. Out of Coca-Cola,” to Houston, where rubber and gas rationing led to overcrowding on city buses that threw whites and Blacks into unwonted jostling proximity.

On the West Coast, Cooke found that San Diego — flush with sailors on leave and recently-arrived workers in aircraft plants — was “the greatest boom-town since the Klondike”: “In the evening, roaming the bars and saloons, you see, alongside much healthy ribaldry among sailors and Marines fresh from the Pacific, plenty of saddening adult… show more.

Samuel Farber grew up in Cuba and has been a prolific commentator on the island’s history and current events for decades. Although Revolution and Reaction is an older book, it is still a vital source for understanding Cuba’s Revolution of 1933 and its aftermath. Written less than two decades after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Farber’s book begins from the premise that analysis of that revolution was oversimplified because observers lacked sophisticated, complex understanding of the island’s decades leading up to that event. In particular, he identifies the Revolution of 1933 as “a major turning point,” and sets out to “analyze the interplay of… structural conditions and historical processes and events” surrounding and following that conflagration. In addition to this overarching analysis, Farber offers discussions of various critically important organizations and constituencies of Cuba’s popular politics.

This short book by a UK humanities professor represents a very brief sympathetic history of socialism written from the left perspective that currently dominates our academic mainstream. In a benign manner and downplaying the dark sides of socialism, Newman narrates the history of the socialist phenomenon from the 1820s “utopian socialism” and Marxism to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution (Stalinist terror has been totally skipped), and to the current eco-socialism and socialist feminism. The best and most informative parts of the book are chapters on Cuban communism and the so-called Swedish model of socialism. I recommend this brochure as a textbook to those who are either committed to the socialist creed or reluctant to critically approach this phenomenon.

This novel is both sexy and chilling. It is the journey of a young woman, about her lovers, the intimacy of friendship, and her alluring social life in Havana, Cuba. With each page you sip the intensity of youth and political drama on the island. After traveling to Cuba to protest the US embargo in the 1990s and living for so many years in Miami with friends in the Cuban diaspora, Cuban's transnational socio-cultural complex frames how I think about islands. I relish how Portela writes, she is the friend who coaxes you out, keeps you up all night, with the promises of thrill, excitement, and a bit of danger. 

“Gitmo” is where the relationship between these nations gets concrete, through the protectorate (1902-1934), republican (1934-1959), and revolutionary eras (1959-present). This fine study gets down into the nitty-gritty of who labors for whom (Cubans for the U.S. military), who controls the physical space in and around a foreign military base (and the foreign military based in it), and the steadily growing class conflict in this flashpoint of empire leading up to the Revolution, followed by an odd stasis since then.

Alexander the Great’s project of uniting and reconciling religions and nations points to a theme in American history—the reconciliation of races and fellow Christians during the American Civil War. In a Black bookstore in Philadelphia, I found a book about this theme, Blake or the Huts of America, by Martin R. Delaney, the first Black to be made an Army officer.

It appeared in 1858, three years before the war. Delaney realized there would soon be a Civil War and explained how we could survive it. His strange recommendation: let a Black army put an end to slavery. That would cost much less than a national Federal army doing the same job. Men of God, not just generals, must lead these Black forces.

Delaney wanted a Black Alexander—but would have accepted a white one—a unifier as well as a conqueror. It’s the best of all American historical novels because Delaney… show more.