Book picks similar to
New York Intellectuals by Alan M. Wald


history
intellectual-history
american-history
non-fiction

The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs


Ray Ginger - 1949
    This moving story presents the definitive account of the life and legacy of the most eloquent spokesperson and leader of the U.S. labor and socialist movements.With a new introduction by Mike Davis.

A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968


Paul Berman - 1996
    The ideological passions that, along with critical acclaim, greeted the publication of Paul Berman's A Tale of Two Utopias showed how persistent are some of the battle lines drawn in the tumultuous years around 1968.A Tale of Two Utopias recounts "in clean, clear, often funny style" (Washington Post) four episodes in the history of a generation: the worldwide student radicalism of the years around 1968; the birth of gay liberation and modern identity politics; the anti-Communist trajectory of the '68ers in the Eastern bloc; and the ideals and self-criticism of thinkers in America and in France who lived through these events and debated their meaning.Praised for both "sheer intellectual high-spiritedness" (Houston Chronicle) and "the same sensitivity to the moral needs of the participants, and the same lucid evaluative balance, as Edmund Wilson's accounts of earlier periods" (philosopher Richard Rorty), A Tale of Two Utopias firmly establishes Berman as "one of America's leading social critics" (New Leader) and "one of our most gifted essayists" (Boston Globe).

Memoirs of a Revolutionary


Victor Serge - 1951
    This facsimile edition brings Charles Lamb's critically acclaimed and revered "Elia" essays back into print.

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern


Stuart Jeffries - 2021
    But beneath its glitzy surface, postmodernism had a dirty secret: it was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism. It was the forcing ground of “post truth,” by means of which western values were turned upside down. But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world?In this brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and still dominates our lives today. He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes, among others: David Bowie, the iPod, Madonna, Jeff Koons’s the Nixon Shock, Judith Butler, Las Vegas, Margaret Thatcher, Grand Master Flash, I Love Dick, the RAND Corporation, the Sex Pistols, Princess Diana, Grand Theft Auto, Jean Baudrillard, Netflix, and 9/11.We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Politicians treat us as consumers to whom they must deliver. Can we do anything other than suffer from buyer’s remorse?

Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics


Kim Phillips-Fein - 2016
    Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was doomed to failure--and promised apocalyptic scenarios if the city didn't fire thousands of workers, freeze wages, and slash social services.In this vivid, gripping account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city, forever transforming the largest metropolis in the United States and reshaping ideas about government throughout the country. In doing so, she brings to life a radically different New York, the legendarily decrepit city of the 1970s. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources as well as interviews with key players in the crisis, Phillips-Fein guides us through the hairpin turns and sudden reversals that brought New York City to the edge of bankruptcy--and kept it from going over. At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in the city's past, a colorful portrait of the unwieldy mechanics of municipal government, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.

Teamster Rebellion


Farrell Dobbs - 1972
    The first in a four-volume series on the class-struggle leadership of the strikes and organizing drives that transformed the Teamsters union in

The Romance of American Communism


Vivian Gornick - 1978
    Writer and critic Vivian Gornick's classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to American life."Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class." So begins Vivian Gornick's exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project.The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin's crimes became public.

Hacia la estación Finlandia (Historia)


Edmund Wilson - 1940
    TO THE FINLAND STATION is a work of history on a grand scale, at once sweeping, detailed, closely reasoned & passionately argued, that succeeds in painting an unforgettable picture--alive with conspirators, philosophers, utopians & nihilists--of the making of the modern world. 'The 1st thing that strikes us about To the Finland Station is the vastness of its scope...It is easily, equally at home in the philosopher's study, in the prisoner's cell, on the steppes, in the streets, melancholy in great country houses, choking in fetid industrial slums...It can remind us that our history is alive & open & rich with excitement & promise'--NY Times Book Review

Living My Life


Emma Goldman - 1931
    This abridged version of her two-volume autobiography takes her from her birthplace in czarist Russia to the socialist enclaves of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Against a dramatic backdrop of political argument, show trials, imprisonment, and tempestuous romances, Goldman chronicles the epoch that she helped shape: the reform movements of the Progressive Era, the early years of and later disillusionment with Lenin’s Bolshevik experiment, and more. Sounding a call still heard today, Living My Life is a riveting account of political ferment and ideological turbulence.First time in Penguin ClassicsCondensed to half the length of Goldman's original work, this edition is accessible to those interested in the activist and her extraordinary era

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's


Frederick Lewis Allen - 1931
    Originally published in 1931, Only Yesterday has an exuberance and proximity to its subject—the Roaring Twenties in all its scandal and glory—that uniquely captures the feel of the era.

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties


Marion Meade - 2004
    These literary heroines did what they wanted and said what they thought, living wholly in the moment. They kicked open the door for twentieth-century women writers and set a new model for every woman trying to juggle the serious issues of economic independence, political power, and sexual freedom. Here are the social and literary triumphs and inevitably the penances paid: crumbled love affairs, abortions, depression, lost beauty, nervous breakdowns, and finally, overdoses and even madness. A vibrant mixture of literary scholarship, social history, and scandal, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin is a rich evocation of a period that will forever intrigue and captivate us.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers


Tom Wolfe - 1970
    The white liberal establishment encounters the newly emerging art of confrontation in two devastatingly funny essays exploring political stances and social styles in a status-minded world.

The Non-Jewish Jew


Isaac Deutscher - 1978
    

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898


Edwin G. Burrows - 1998
    Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe.In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city.The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity


Marshall Berman - 1982
    In this unparalleled book, Marshall Berman takes account of the social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world and the impact of modernism on art, literature and architecture. This new edition contains an updated preface addressing the critical role the onset of modernism played in popular democratic upheavals in the late 1920s.