Book picks similar to
Armed Struggle in Italy 1976-78: A Chronology by Jean Weir


gladio
history
resistance-history
revolutions-resistance-insurrection

A Carpenter's Life as Told by Houses


Larry Haun - 2011
    Larry Haun is as much a historian and philosopher as he is a 60-year veteran carpenter. Larry's memoir would be equally at home on the bookshelves of home building and architecture enthusiasts as anyone on a spiritual journey."- Brian Pontolilo, Editor, Fine Homebuilding Magazine The unforgettable memoir of a legendary builder. You don't have to be a carpenter to appreciate this fascinating book that Publishers Weekly calls, "a first person timeline of 20th century American residential architecture... combining ...two literary styles: the memoir and the how-to book." A moving story of that place we call home. An early advocate for building lean and green and an avid blogger, Larry Haun tells his unique story in terms of twelve homes - built over the last 100 years. These are homes he knows intimately, drawing the reader in with detailed descriptions and thoughtful observations. "Just like any good carpenter, Haun brings his own artistic flourishes to the job of storytelling.... But where Haun's true personality comes across is when he describes the construction process for the many houses he has lived in and built--from his parent's 1,000-sq. ft. wood-frame house and the adobe and cob structures of the Southwest to the mid-century pre-fabricated and tract houses, and the more recent Habitat for Humanity homes he has donated his time to help erect." Publishers Weekly, 6/13/2011A delight to read. A great gift. This engaging memoir will appeal to anyone who appreciates a well-told story. A Carpenter's Life As Told in Houses explores our love of home - feelings so deeply rooted that they go far beyond wood and plaster and shingles. Share the author's deep connection to the natural world, his yearning for simplicity, and respect for humanity - and see why he believes that less is more.

The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism


Kyla Schuller - 2021
    Yet they have fought for the few, not the many. As award-winning scholar Kyla Schuller argues, their white feminist politics dispossess the most marginalized to liberate themselves.In The Trouble with White Women, Schuller brings to life the two-hundred-year counter history of Black, Indigenous, Latina, poor, queer, and trans women pushing back against white feminists and uniting to dismantle systemic injustice. These feminist heroes such as Frances Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauli Murray have created an anti-racist feminism for all. But we don’t speak their names and we don’t know their legacies. Unaware of these intersectional leaders, feminists have been led down the same dead-end alleys generation after generation, often working within the structures of racism, capitalism, homophobia, and transphobia rather than against them. Building a more just feminist politics for today requires a reawakening, a return to the movement’s genuine vanguards and visionaries. Their compelling stories, campaigns, and conflicts reveal the true potential of feminist liberation. The Trouble with White Women gives feminists today the tools to fight for the flourishing of all.

All You Need To Know About The City (All You Need To Know Guides)


Christopher Stoakes - 2007
    Product Condition: No Defects.

The Road to Kalamata: A Congo Mercenary's Personal Memoir


Mike Hoare - 1931
    European mercenaries were brought into a variety of conflicts in Africa in the 60s and 70s; this is the personal account of the most famous of the mercenary leaders.

Noise/Music: A History


Paul Hegarty - 2007
    It situates different musics in their cultural and historical context, and analyses them in terms of cultural aesthetics. Paul Hegarty argues that noise is a judgement about sound, that what was noise can become acceptable as music, and that in many ways the idea of noise is similar to the idea of the avant-garde.While it provides an excellent historical overview, the book's main concern is in the noise music that has emerged since the mid 1970s, whether through industrial music, punk, free jazz, or the purer noise of someone like Merzbow. The book progresses seamlessly from discussions of John Cage, Erik Satie, and Pauline Oliveros through to bands like Throbbing Gristle and the Boredoms. Sharp and erudite, and underpinned throughout by the ideas of thinkers like Adorno and Deleuze, Noise/Music is the perfect primer for anyone interested in the louder side of experimental music.

The Believer: How an Introvert with a Passion for Religion and Soccer Became Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Leader of the Islamic State (The Brookings Essay)


William McCants - 2015
    ISIS), a group so brutal and hardline that even al-Qaida deemed them too extreme. Baghdadi, an introverted religious scholar, with a passion for soccer, now controls large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria. McCants shows how Baghdadi became radicalized in the Saddam Hussein era and found his path to power after connecting with other radicals in an American prison during the Iraq War, culminating in his declaration of a reborn Islamic empire bent on world conquest.

Freud for Beginners


Richard Osborne - 1993
    His influence on 20th-century thinking and issues is arguably unparalleled, affecting attitudes on sex, religion, art, culture, and more. Written for the layperson, Freud for Beginners explains the doctor's dogma with wit and clarity, all in a contemporary context.

John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights


David S. Reynolds - 2005
    Reynolds presents an informative and richly considered new exploration of the paradox of a man steeped in the Bible but more than willing to kill for his abolitionist cause. Reynolds locates Brown within the currents of nineteenth-century life and compares him to modern terrorists, civil-rights activists, and freedom fighters. Ultimately, he finds neither a wild-eyed fanatic nor a Christ-like martyr, but a passionate opponent of racism so dedicated to eradicating slavery that he realized only blood could scour it from the country he loved. By stiffening the backbone of Northerners and showing Southerners there were those who would fight for their cause, he hastened the coming of the Civil War. This is a vivid and startling story of a man and an age on the verge of calamity.

City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center


James Glanz - 2003
    . . Those who delighted in Caro's "Power Broker" will relish" City in the Sky."" -Thomas Bender, "The New York Times Book Review" The World Trade Center was the biggest and brashest icon that New York has ever produced-a pair of magnificent giants that became intimately familiar around the globe. In this vivid, brilliantly researched narrative, "New York Times" reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton re-create the life of the World Trade Center from its genesis in David Rockefeller's ambition to rebuild lower Manhattan to the spirited battles with local storeowners and powerful politicians who opposed it, to the bold structural engineering innovations that would later determine who lived and died in its collapse. And like David McCullough's "The Great Bridge," "City in the Sky" is a riveting story of New York itself- of architectural daring, political maneuvering, human ambition and frailty, and a lost American icon.

Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream


Leonard Zeskind - 2009
    Leonard Zeskind draws heavily upon court documents, racist publications, and first-person reports, along with his own personal observations. An internationally recognized expert on the subject who received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work, Zeskind ties together seemingly disparate strands—from neo-Nazi skinheads, to Holocaust deniers, to Christian Identity churches, to David Duke, to the militia and beyond. Among these elements, two political strategies—mainstreaming and vanguardism—vie for dominance. Mainstreamers believe that a majority of white Christians will eventually support their cause. Vanguardists build small organizations made up of a highly dedicated cadre and plan a naked seizure of power. Zeskind shows how these factions have evolved into a normative social movement that looks like a demographic slice of white America, mostly blue-collar and working middle class, with lawyers and Ph.D.s among its leaders. When the Cold War ended, traditional conservatives helped birth a new white nationalism, most evident now among anti-immigrant organizations. With the dawn of a new millennium, they are fixated on predictions that white people will lose their majority status and become one minority among many. The book concludes with a look to the future, elucidating the growing threat these groups will pose to coming generations.

Crazy All the Time: On The Psych Ward of Bellevue Hospital


Frederick L. Covan - 1994
    Written in the tradition of A Woman in Residence and First, Do No Harm, this vivid and acclaimed work of true medicine tells the stories of nine doctoral candidates who spend a year of internship on the psychiatric ward at New York City's infamous Bellevue Hospital.

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress


Howard Zinn - 2006
    Zinn addresses America's current political/ethical crisis using lessons learned from our nation’s history. Zinn brings a profoundly human, yet uniquely American perspective to each subject he writes about, whether it’s the abolition of war, terrorism, the Founding Fathers, the Holocaust, defending the rights of immigrants, or personal liberties. Written in an accessible, personal tone, Zinn approaches the telling of U.S. history from an active, engaged point of view. "America's future is linked to how we understand our past,” writes Zinn; "For this reason, writing about history, for me, is never a neutral act."Zinn frames the book with an opening essay titled "If History is to be Creative," a reflection on the role and responsibility of the historian. "To think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past," writes Zinn, "is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat." "If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, and occasionally win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare."Buzzing with stories and ideas, Zinn draws upon fascinating, little-known historical anecdotes spanning from the Declaration of Independence to the USA PATRIOT Act to comment on the most controversial issues facing us today: government dishonesty, how to respond to terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the loss of our liberties, immigration, and the responsibility of the citizen to confront power for the common good.Considered a "modern-day Thoreau" by Jonathon Kozol, Zinn's inspired writings address the reader as an active participant in history making. "We live in a beautiful country,” writes Zinn, in the book’s opening chapter. “But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back."Featuring essays penned over an eight-year period, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress is Howard Zinn’s first writerly work in several years, an invaluable post-9/11-era addition to the themes that run through his bestselling classic, A People’s History Of the United States.Howard Zinn is a veteran of World War II and author of many books and plays, including the million-selling classic, A People’s History of the United States. "Thank you, Howard Zinn. Thank you for telling us what none of our leaders are willing to: The truth. And you tell it with such brilliance, such humanity. It is a personal honor to be able to say I am a better citizen because of you."--Michael Moore, director of the film Fahrenheit 9/11, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!"Find here the voice of the well-educated and honorable and capable and human United States of America, which might have existed if only absolute power had not corrupted its third-rate leaders so absolutely."-- Kurt Vonnegut, author of A Man Without a Country

Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000


Martin Torgoff - 2004
    In Can't Find My Way Home, journalist and filmmaker Martin Torgoff chronicles what a long strange trip it's been as the American Century became the Great Stoned Age. Weaving together first-person accounts and historical background, Can't Find My Way Home is a narrative vast in scope yet rich in intimate detail. Torgoff tells the stories of those whose lives became synonymous with the drug culture, from Charlie Parker, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John Belushi to ordinary people who felt their consciousness "expanded" or who plumbed the depths of addiction. He also examines the broader impact of drugs on society and politics, from the war on drugs to the recovery movement, and the continuing debate over drug policy. A vivid work of cultural history that neither demonizes nor romanticizes its subject, Can't Find My Way Home is a provocative and fascinating look at how drugs have entered the American mainstream.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It


Richard Florida - 2017
    And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement in his groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world's superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality. Meanwhile, many more cities still stagnate, and middle-class neighborhoods everywhere are disappearing. Our winner-take-all cities are just one manifestation of a profound crisis in today's urbanized knowledge economy. A bracingly original work of research and analysis, The New Urban Crisis offers a compelling diagnosis of our economic ills and a bold prescription for more inclusive cities capable of ensuring growth and prosperity for all.

The Coolest Race on Earth: Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the Antarctica Marathon


John Hanc - 2009
    When he turned 50 he gave himself the birthday present to end all others--a trip to the end of the Earth to run his most unforgettable race.            The Coolest Race on Earth is both Hanc’s story and the story of the Antarctica Marathon, first held in 1995 and now an annual event that sells out years in advance. It’s full of humor, adventure, and inspiring characters--including a wheelchair-bound competitor, three record-breaking grandmothers, and an ex-Marine who described the race as “the hardest thing I ever did in my life, next to Vietnam.”            Muddy, cold, hilly, the race is by all accounts horrible--up and down a melting glacier twice, past curious penguins and hostile skuas, and finally to a bleak finish line. Even the best runners take longer to run the Antarctica Marathon than any other.            Yet the allure of marathon running combined with the fascinating reputation of the Last Continent has persuaded runners to brave a trip across the world’s most turbulent body of water, the Drake Passage, to a land of extinct volcanoes and craggy mountain peaks, lost explorers and isolated scientists, penguin rookeries and whale sightings, all for a chance to run those crazy 26.2 miles. The Coolest Race on Earth brings the world’s most difficult marathon to life in a book that’s not only a ripping read, but also a deeply funny meditation on what makes people run.