Here are 100 books that Buying Power fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a Colorado-raised and California-based historian, professor, and writer. I recently published my first book, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism, which explores the history of one of the longest-running consumer boycotts in American history – the boycott of Coors beer. In telling this particular history, I became fascinated with the boycott as a tool of protest and activism. The boycott is an iconic and regular feature of American politics and history, but it is often dismissed as ineffective or passive. The books on this list (as well as many others) have helped to convince me that the boycott and consumer activism can be powerful forms of solidarity-building and protest.
One of the most iconic and best-known boycotts of the 20th century is the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, launched by Rosa Parks’ famous act of civil disobedience. But as Blair L.M. Kelley demonstrates in Right to Ride, the Montgomery movement grew out of a longer tradition of boycotts and protest in the United States. In the 1850s, Black women in New York City protested segregation in the city’s streetcars. Decades later, Black activists boycotted segregated streetcars in at least twenty-five southern cities between 1900 and 1907. Kelley’s book, which tells this forgotten and, at times, failed history, reminds us that boycott movements are important forms of resistance – even under threats of violence and in the face of significant obstacles.
A civil rights movement in an earlier generation. Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. ""Right to Ride"" chronicles the litigation and local organizing against segregated rails that led to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and the streetcar boycott movement waged in twenty-five southern cities from 1900 to 1907. Kelley tells the stories of the brave but little-known men and women who faced down the violence of…
I’m a Colorado-raised and California-based historian, professor, and writer. I recently published my first book, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism, which explores the history of one of the longest-running consumer boycotts in American history – the boycott of Coors beer. In telling this particular history, I became fascinated with the boycott as a tool of protest and activism. The boycott is an iconic and regular feature of American politics and history, but it is often dismissed as ineffective or passive. The books on this list (as well as many others) have helped to convince me that the boycott and consumer activism can be powerful forms of solidarity-building and protest.
Women – and housewives – have long done most of a household’s shopping, making them the arbiters of family consumer habits. But as Twarog details in this fascinating book, many working-class American women have used their status as housewives to engage in protest and build power. Politics of the Pantry focuses particularly on battles over the cost of food – especially meat – in the 20th century. Women-led meat boycotts occurred in 1935, 1966, 1969, and 1973, for example. This slim volume is readable, engaging, and highlights the important role that women have played in consumer politics.
The history of women's involvement in politics has focused most heavily on electoral politics, but throughout the twentieth century a far wider range of women has engaged in political activity when they found it increasingly challenging to feed their families and balance their household ledgers. The Politics of the Pantry examines the rise and fall of the American housewife as a political constituency group. It examines how working- and middle-class housewives' relationship with the state evolved over the course of the century. Shifting the focus away from the workplace as a site of protest, it looks to the homefront as…
I’m a Colorado-raised and California-based historian, professor, and writer. I recently published my first book, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism, which explores the history of one of the longest-running consumer boycotts in American history – the boycott of Coors beer. In telling this particular history, I became fascinated with the boycott as a tool of protest and activism. The boycott is an iconic and regular feature of American politics and history, but it is often dismissed as ineffective or passive. The books on this list (as well as many others) have helped to convince me that the boycott and consumer activism can be powerful forms of solidarity-building and protest.
The literature on Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and their boycott campaigns is quite extensive. Matt Garcia’s is one of the best accounts of the Farm Workers’ strategy of boycotting grapes, lettuce, and other items to build power and win a union. What I especially appreciate about Garcia’s account is, first, his focus on the innovations in consumer activism brought about by the UFW. Organizers and workers made their boycott succeed by going into cities, living together in boycott houses, and appealing to urban consumers. Garcia’s accounts of boycott houses and organizers’ efforts from Los Angeles to Toronto and London are excellent. Second, Garcia doesn’t stray from critiquing the boycott tactic and noting places where it fell short – making this a cautionary tale for activists today.
From the Jaws of Victory:The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement is the most comprehensive history ever written on the meteoric rise and precipitous decline of the United Farm Workers, the most successful farm labor union in United States history. Based on little-known sources and one-of-a-kind oral histories with many veterans of the farm worker movement, this book revises much of what we know about the UFW. Matt Garcia's gripping account of the expansion of the union's grape boycott reveals how the boycott, which UFW leader Cesar Chavez initially resisted, became the defining feature of…
I’m a Colorado-raised and California-based historian, professor, and writer. I recently published my first book, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism, which explores the history of one of the longest-running consumer boycotts in American history – the boycott of Coors beer. In telling this particular history, I became fascinated with the boycott as a tool of protest and activism. The boycott is an iconic and regular feature of American politics and history, but it is often dismissed as ineffective or passive. The books on this list (as well as many others) have helped to convince me that the boycott and consumer activism can be powerful forms of solidarity-building and protest.
You’ll never look at table grapes the same after reading Tinsman’s excellent Buying into the Regime. Her book takes a different approach from the texts above – instead of looking at a single movement, she focuses on a single industry (Chilean grapes) in multiple contexts: cultivation in Chile, Cold War consumption in the United States, and consumer activism and grape boycotts in both nations. The result is a remarkable transnational history that underscores how consumption itself is a “terrain of political struggle.” Tinsman’s expansive perspective, which engages a number of different fields, also offers lessons for activists in the age of globalization, notably that building transnational alliances is incredibly difficult work.
Buying into the Regime is a transnational history of how Chilean grapes created new forms of consumption and labor politics in both the United States and Chile. After seizing power in 1973, Augusto Pinochet embraced neoliberalism, transforming Chile's economy. The country became the world's leading grape exporter. Heidi Tinsman traces the rise of Chile's fruit industry, examining how income from grape production enabled fruit workers, many of whom were women, to buy the commodities-appliances, clothing, cosmetics-flowing into Chile, and how this new consumerism influenced gender relations, as well as pro-democracy movements. Back in the United States, Chilean and U.S. businessmen…
I grew up in Los Angeles, the mecca of global consumer culture. I became a historian to escape from what I saw as this shallow, surface culture but through my work, I have returned to the mall. My work uses history to show how consumer desires are not natural. Instead, I ask why people consume particular things in particular places, and I show how they attribute meaning to the things they buy. I am not a specialist on China but while researching and writing on tea's global political economy and consumer culture I became fascinated by how China contributed to the making of global tastes, desires, and material culture. These books illuminate the history and cultural life of tea, opium, porcelain, and other things within and beyond China.
Gerth's sweeping research, eye for detail, and beautiful prose help us understand how the rejection of foreign commodities was critical to the creation of Chinese nationalism and state-building in the early twentieth century. Rather than reject consumer culture per se, the Government and businesses pushed the Chinese to consume only "Chinese" goods. This nationalistic consumer culture was built though with the same tools we find in the West--advertising, exhibitions, and fashion. Chinese consumer culture can be seen then as both global and local.
"Chinese people should consume Chinese products!" This slogan was the catchphrase of a movement in early twentieth-century China that sought to link consumption and nationalism by instilling a concept of China as a modern "nation" with its own "national products." From fashions in clothing to food additives, from museums to department stores, from product fairs to advertising, this movement influenced all aspects of China's burgeoning consumer culture. Anti-imperialist boycotts, commemorations of national humiliations, exhibitions of Chinese products, the vilification of treasonous consumers, and the promotion of Chinese captains of industry helped enforce nationalistic consumption and spread the message-patriotic Chinese bought…
Frank R. Kardes, Ph.D. is the Donald E. Weston Professor of Marketing and Distinguished Research Professor at the Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award of the Society for Consumer Psychology, and a Fellow of five national professional societies. His research focuses on omission neglect, consumer judgment, and inference processes, persuasion and advertising, and consumer and managerial decision making. He was Co-Editor of Advances in Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Handbook of Consumer Psychology, and Marketing Letters, and serves or has served on seven editorial boards. He has published nine books and over 100 articles and chapters on consumer psychology.
This textbook is scientifically grounded but highly readable. This book offers an information-processing perspective to help us get inside the head of the consumer and to understand how attention, memory, judgment, and inference processes operate in concert to influence consumer decision making. Consumers are frequently unaware of these influences on their thinking and reasoning.
This wide-ranging yet focused text provides an informative introduction to consumer behavior supported by in-depth, scientifically grounded coverage of key principles and applications.
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR, Second Edition, devotes ample attention to "classic" consumer behavior topics, including consumer information processing, consumer decision making, persuasion, social media and the role of culture and society on consumer behavior. In addition, this innovative text explores important current topics and trends relevant to modern consumer behavior, such as international and ethical perspectives, an examination of contemporary media, and a discussion of online tactics and branding strategies. This versatile text strikes an ideal balance among theoretical…
I became curious about US imperialism and Latin American history after reading Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. While pursuing a BA in History and Spanish at Dalhousie and an MA and PhD in Latin American Studies and History at Georgetown, I learned that Marquez's fictional banana worker massacre really happened in 1928 Colombia. What made me focus on sugar, rather than bananas, is the fact that sugar’s not really food... it often takes over land where food was planted, and the lack of food leads to a potentially revolutionary situation. I've used the following books in my classes about Revolution, Populism, and Commodities in Latin America at York University's Glendon College.
To get through over a hundred books on my History PhD comprehensive exams list, I allowed myself a maximum of one reading day plus a maximum of one double-sided cue card per book.
Jeff Gould crammed so much super cool theory about populism and revolution, workers, and women into his beautifully written book that he got four cue cards and three days! Gould explains that the first Somoza (named “Anastasio”) rose to power largely thanks to US influence, but, once there, he built his own following and passed some remarkably progressive reforms, at least on paper.
The book changed the way I think about populism and revolution in Latin America, completely inspiring the PhD research that became my first book and my current project on rural populism in Brazil. To Lead as Equals shows how powerful sugar workers can be when rural sugar-cane cutters unite with industrial sugar-factory workers, and…
This book is a carefully argued study of peasants and labor during the Somoza regime, focusing on popular movements in the economically strategic department of Chinandega in western Nicaragua. Jeffrey Gould traces the evolution of group consciousness among peasants and workers as they moved away from extreme dependency on the patron to achieve an autonomous social and political ideology. In doing so, he makes important contributions to peasant studies and theories of revolution, as well as our understanding of Nicaraguan history.
According to Gould, when Anastasio Somoza first came to power in 1936, workers and peasants took the Somocista reform…
I currently spend my time researching (and worrying about) nuclear war and how to stop it from ever happening. I live about 25 miles away from where the UK’s nuclear weapons are based, so I have a very personal interest in making sure that nuclear war never becomes a reality! As a lecturer at the University of Glasgow I’m also embarking on a four-year research fellowship with over £1 million in funding where I will be leading a team of experts to research how to improve nuclear arms control and disarmament. So keep in touch if you want to reduce the risk of nuclear war and ban the bomb!
A lot of people are consigned to the belief that nuclear weapons are here to stay and that nuclear disarmament is a naïve pipe dream. Ray Acheson’s book is the perfect remedy to this pessimistic malady, as it lays out the case for nuclear disarmament in an accessible way.
I love how Acheson grounds the book in academic research and gives a fascinating insider's account of how activists and diplomats worked together to make the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons a reality. Acheson also demonstrates how the existence of nuclear weapons is reliant on the injustices of capitalism, sexism, colonialism, and racism.
I read this book and felt optimistic that ordinary people like you and me can challenge these injustices and achieve seemingly impossible things if we work together.
As an author of historical fiction, I have a number of time periods that I go back to again and again. Both the 1960s (specifically, the late 1960s) and the 1990s are two of those eras that I just can’t get enough of. The parallels between these two time periods are very compelling: both were times of political upheaval and amazing music, with young people leading the charge, hoping to create a better world than the one they were disenchanted with.
A tale of close sisters who find themselves at odds as their belief systems are challenged during the height of the Vietnam War; their lives deviating from one another as their priorities change.
A poignant novel about how even the strongest of familial relationships can be torn asunder in times of turmoil and upheaval, but how the purest love can bring them back together again.
Rosa and Esther march through downtown Detroit in August 1968 to protest the war in Vietnam. When a bloodied teenager reports that mounted police are beating protestors a few blocks away, the young women hurry to offer assistance. They try to stop the violence, but an officer is injured and the sisters are arrested. Rosa sees an opportunity to protest the war in court. Esther has an infant daughter and wants to avoid prison, which means accepting a plea bargain and testifying against her sister. Told from multiple points of view and through the sisters' never-mailed letters, Her Sister's Tattoo…
I don’t know when I became aware of and bothered by racial inequality but looking back, I see touchstones that lighted my path even before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech stiffened my spine in middle school. I participated in sit-ins at lunch counters and sat in the back of buses. Even though I was a white kid in a predominately white school, it became personal to me. The injustice and unfairness of prejudice and discrimination was the antithesis of what I believed was the promise of America. In recent years, the quiet background noise of racial inequity has amplified to an ugly level. I recommend these books as a start to understanding and rectifying the current unacceptable situation.
An intimate and historically accurate portrait of an extraordinary civil rights icon. Meachem carefully recreates the struggles for equality in the life of John Lewis. The passing of Lewis to the close proximity of our loss of Elijah Cummings left a deep hole in my heart that was soothed by this masterful portrayal of a real American hero. An uplifting book that shines a bright light of hope for future improvement.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of America
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND COSMOPOLITAN
John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of…
