Here are 100 books that We Want Everything fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, I’ve 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, I’m 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, experimenting—and continuing to do so despite failures.
How could a bunch of creative, courageous, but also somewhat crazy activists make the authoritarian regime of Poland under communist rule tremble? By bringing a moment of joy and laughter to an otherwise dull and grey world. That is what the Polish Orange Alternative Movement did during the late 1980s.
Lives of the Orange Men tells the story of the group. It’s a book that simply made me laugh a lot. Written as a series of captivating autobiographies—and not every word is to be taken seriously!—it is full of anecdotes of activists playfully mocking authorities. “What are those pills,” police once wondered after searching the backpack of an arrested activist. “Happy pills,” the man replied. One officer was eager to try them; happy pills just sounded too good. They turned out to be mints.
Between 1981 and 1989 in Wroclaw Poland, in an atmosphere in which dissent was forbidden and martial law a reality, the art-activist Orange Alternative movement developed and deployed their socialist sur-realism in absurd street-painting and large-scale performances comprising tens of thousands of people dressed as dwarves, in an effort to destabilize the Communist government. It worked. Beginning with the dialectical painting of dwarves onto the patches of white paint all over the citys walls, which uncannily marked the censorship of opposition slogans, the group moved on to both stage happenings and over-enthusiastically embrace official Soviet festivals in a way that…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I’m a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, I’ve 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, I’m 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, experimenting—and continuing to do so despite failures.
A lot has been written about the famous May ’68 in France, but to me, Kristin Ross’s book stands out because of what she argues was at the heart of the protests: they were an experiment “in declassification, in disrupting the natural ‘givenness of places,’” an attempt to question the very order of society.
Students left their spaces of study to engage with workers; workers—or at least some of them—refused to return to the hell their workplace was: they didn’t 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 a…
I’m a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, I’ve 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, I’m 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, experimenting—and continuing to do so despite failures.
What fascinates me about the history of protesting isn’t 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 Roseneil’s book made me dream and smile: a deeply human and intimate book based on oral history interviews, telling the story of the women’s 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 Roseneil’s 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 “queer space,” 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 its…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I’m a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, I’ve 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, I’m 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, experimenting—and 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 Fürst’s book taught me otherwise. It leads into a world of people like Azazello and Ofelia, who look like “angels, creatures from another world, blots of color on a grey canvas, flowers in a concrete desert.”
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 Fürst’s 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 hundred…
Women’s rights in the workplace have been my passion for thirty years. As a sociologist who does fieldwork and oral histories, I am interested in understanding work through workers’ perspectives. The most important thing I’ve learned is that employers can be notoriously reluctant to enact change and that the most effective route to workplace justice is through collective action. I keep writing because I want more of us to imagine workplaces that value workers by compensating everyone fairly and giving workers greater control over their office’s rhythm and structure.
Did you know that until 1974, the job category ‘domestic worker’ was excluded from labor rights that were established in FDR’s New Deal legislation such as the minimum wage and workers’ compensation? Did you know that 1960s union leaders ignored the exploitative labor conditions of domestic work because they considered these workers “unorganizable”?
Historian Premilla Nadasan’s wonderful book tells the story of Black domestic workers’ exclusion from legal rights to which other workers were entitled and their fight to gain those rights beginning in the 1950s and extending through the establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974.
Telling this history through the life stories of domestic workers who were leaders in this movement makes this book a particularly compelling and worthwhile read.
Telling the stories of African American domestic workers, this book resurrects a little-known history of domestic worker activism in the 1960s and 1970s, offering new perspectives on race, labor, feminism, and organizing.
In this groundbreaking history of African American domestic-worker organizing, scholar and activist Premilla Nadasen shatters countless myths and misconceptions about an historically misunderstood workforce. Resurrecting a little-known history of domestic-worker activism from the 1950s to the 1970s, Nadasen shows how these women were a far cry from the stereotyped passive and powerless victims; they were innovative labor organizers who tirelessly organized on buses and streets across the United…
I am drawn to stories of women who display a fighting spirit, faith in themselves, and the drive to help others. Perhaps this is due to growing up during the women’s rights movement. So many women paved the way for me. Perhaps it was my upbringing. I was raised with six siblings - three brothers and three sisters – and my parents never thought that my sisters and I couldn’t do something just because we were girls. Combine these experiences with the fact that I love history and you can see why I love these stories. Now I get to write and share stories like these with young readers. Lucky me!
I have long been a fan of stories about courageous women and I love it when I discover a book for young readers that brings to life an inspiring story of someone they may not know well (or at all). That’s exactly what Warren does in this book about Delores Huerta. The text works well for even the youngest readers. It promotes empathy by describing the poor living conditions of migrant children and their parents. Its themes are as relevant today as they were in Delores’ time. We need to care, we need to stand up for others, we need to be fair. It’s beautifully illustrated, too.
A Jane Addam's Children's Book Award Honor Book for Younger Children
Dolores is a teacher, a mother, and a friend. She wants to know why her students are too hungry to listen, why they don't have shoes to wear to school. Dolores is a warrior, an organizer, and a peacemaker. When she finds out that the farm workers in her community are poorly paid and working under dangerous conditions, she stands up for their rights.
This is the story of Dolores Huerta and the extraordinary battle she waged to ensure fair and safe work places for migrant workers. The powerful…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I'm a labor journalist. I've spent the past 20 years writing widely about inequality, class war, unions, and the way that power works in America. My parents were civil rights and antiwar activists in the 1960s and 70s, and they instilled in me an appreciation for the fact that social movements are often the only thing standing between regular people and exploitation. My curiosity about power imbalances in America drew me inexorably towards the absence of worker power and led me to the conclusion that the labor movement is the tool that can solve America's most profound problems. I grew up in Florida, live in Brooklyn, and report all over.
Steven Greenhouse, who spent decades as The New York Times' labor reporter, writes as gooda survey of the state of the present-day labor movement as you can find anywhere.
Uberdrivers, health care workers, auto workers, and more, this is a book for anyone who wonderswhere union power stands, how it’s gotten here, and who the players are who are trying torevive unions for a new century.
“A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —The New York Times Book Review
We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power.
Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the…
My passion for Central American politics and history derived quite directly from the conflicts in the region from the late 1970s onwards. Previously I had worked in Bolivia, where I had studied as a doctoral student, and although many people still view Latin American countries as pretty homogenous, I quickly discovered that they are very far from being so. I had to unlearn quite a bit and acquire new skills, although luckily, indigenous languages are really only dominant in Guatemala. Now we can be rather less partisan although many injustices remain.
Dalton was a wonderful poet and radical activist tragically executed by his Salvadorean comrades in 1975 when they erroneously believed him to be working for the CIA. The Salvadorean left has a poor record in devouring its own in bouts of paranoia that attended the civil war of the 1980s. Marmol, who survived deep into old age, was a ringleader of an uprising in 1932 that briefly promised a peasant overthrow of a state controlled by an oligarchy of a dozen families. The uprising was repressed with such force that the military was able to retain political power for the next four decades. This book is beautifully written and translated wonderfully well by Richard Schaaf and Kathleen Ross.
Miguel Mármol is the testimony of a revolutionary, as recorded by Salvadoran writer, Roque Dalton, which documents the historical and political events of El Salvador through the first decades of the 20th century. This Latin American classic describes the growth and development of the workers' movement and the communist party in El Salvador and Guatemala, and contains Mármol's impressions of post-revolutionary Russia in the twenties, describing in vivid detail the brutality and repression of the Martínez dictatorship and the reemergence of the workers' movement after Martínez was ousted. It also gives a broad and clear picture of the lives of…
I am a novelist with my debut, The One, out in April 2023. I’m interested in stories about the role of gender, technology, and privacy in our contemporary culture.We spend so many hours at work, yet often the literature we read spends so little time discussing what that experience is actually like. As I wrote my own novel with a narrator flailing so aimlessly through her early post-grad years that she ends up on a reality dating show, I craved other books that tackled what it was like to have to earn a living at the forefront of the text, rather than a nebulous character detail in the background.
To close off the list, I picked a novel where the main character ends up becoming energized by her work.
At an otherwise soul-sucking job at a PR firm, Ellinor becomes involved with, and motivated by, a political movement about supporting postal workers in Norway.
For a novel that could have been bogged down by the inner workings of the EU and the Norwegian Postal Service, Hjorth’s writing style is crisp and perfect. She could choose any subject matter and it would be interesting.
Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.
This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
Growing up in a blue-collar union family in the 1950s South I learned about the depth of racial and class injustice and the power of collective organizing. The many jobs I held in my twenties before fleeing to graduate school at Stanford University left me acutely aware of workplace sexism and disrespect. I became fascinated by how work shapes our sense of self and especially curious about the distinctive feminisms, labor movements, and politics of working-class women. These questions animate all my writing and teaching. Thirty years and seven books later, I believe reimagining work and labor movements is more necessary – and possible – than ever before.
Domestic workers, among the most exploited of the world’s working classes, knew they deserved more and believed the work they did – caring for the children, the disabled, the elderly – should be honored.
They organized first in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Soon the movement spread across the world. Jennifer Fish travels with the movement, from Cape Town to Geneva, Montevideo, and beyond. Like the women she befriends, Fish believes in the power of community and of what can be achieved when workers imagine the world they want and start moving together toward it.
There’s no better book about international worker solidarity and the power of thinking and acting both local and global.
From grassroots to global activism, the untold story of the world's first domestic workers' movement.
Domestic workers exist on the margins of the world labor market. Maids, nannies, housekeepers, au pairs, and other care workers are most often 'off the books,' working for long hours and low pay. They are not afforded legal protections or benefits such as union membership, health care, vacation days, and retirement plans. Many women who perform these jobs are migrants, and are oftentimes dependent upon their employers for room and board as well as their immigration status, creating an extremely vulnerable category of workers in…
