100 books like Durruti in the Spanish Revolution

Oil isn’t the only natural resource that can curse: the Belgian colonizers inflicted decades of extraordinary brutality on the peoples of the Congo while extracting their ivory and rubber.

Hochschild paints horrific vistas of extreme greed and violence, and also tells the stories of the heroic individuals who resisted it. I didn’t know much about real ‘The Heart of Darkness’ before reading this book—now I know that the true savages were the Europeans.

If The Many-Headed Hydra revealed a hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic, Caliban and the Witch totally upended my understanding of witches, gender, and the rise of capitalism. A landmark text that sent shockwaves across the history field, Silvia Federici’s writing on the role of unwaged and reproductive labour in the making of the modern world is unrivaled. In a testament to its power and reach, Penguin released a new edition in 2021. A book to give to every socialist dude-bro or those who doubt the importance of gender to profit and power. 

Charting the revolutionary Atlantic through the stories of mutinous seamen, radical soldiers, unruly women, slaves, pirates, and common workers, this is a rip-roaring example of ‘history from below.’ By revealing the hidden history of resistance and how it weaves back and forth through time and across oceans, The Many-Headed Hydra showed me the power of history told through the lives of everyday people. It’s engaging. Sweeping. Political. A deserving sibling of EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. And a great example of how pulling at threads can reveal surprising connections. A must-read and one I pull off the shelf whenever I’m in need of inspiration.

Trouillot explains like no other why we need to care about how history is made.

Whatever your area of expertise or level of knowledge about Haiti, Trouillot will make you care about the country’s forgotten history. Each essay in this volume demonstrates why we remember certain aspects of the past and ignore others and how those ignored parts are so often not just forgotten but actively silenced.

I teach this book to history undergraduates and graduate students alike. They always tell me that it was one of their favorites. It’s also a book that I wished I had known when I started studying history.

Soares’ very funny novel bridges my focus on anarchist culture and transnational anarchism. Soares’ title character is an anarchist born of a Brazilian woman. His anarchist politics are always on display as he sets out to assassinate tyrannous figures around the world. For those looking for a sympathetic story of anarchists, our clumsy, error-prone, would-be assassin does not fit the bill. However, his popping up around the world at times of key global events is bizarre and ultimately quite entertaining. If nothing else, Twelve Fingers is a reminder of how even the best-laid plans with noble intents can go disastrously astray.

Paradoxes—a 2010 translation of his 2001 work—was an important addition to the emerging literature on anarchist cultural politics—a literature that began with a fellow Argentinian historian Dora Borrancos, who wrote Anarquismo, educación y costumbres en la Argentina de principios de siglo (1990). My book built on this emerging exploration of anarchists outside the workplace. Paradoxes explores anarchist newspapers, culture, plays, meetings, and other activities radicals used to promote anarchism while also offering entertainment and relaxation. Suriano is not myopic. He notes that in a time when other forms of entertainment like cinema emerged, workers had competing forms of commercialized amusement to pursue. This book—like other cultural histories—breathes life into old histories of anarchism that often were boring “ABC histories,” i.e., stories of one union acronym after another.

Spanish-speaking anarchists from Spain and Latin America often circularly migrated between the United States and Latin America, especially Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, and Mexico. Writing Revolution’s fifteen chapters explore the transnational and print culture of these anarchists in the United States as they communicated with, learned from, and supported their colleagues across Latin America. Correspondence and newspapers from Latin America fueled their support for Cuba’s War for Independence in the 1890s, the Mexican Revolution, social justice campaigns across the Americas, and hemispheric-wide efforts to support the Spanish Civil War and Revolution in the 1930s. Again, anarchist culture and transnational politics are intimately interlinked and illustrate how these two approaches provide a wealth of material to write the histories of radical leftists who agitated for anarchism decades before the emergence of Moscow-influenced Marxist political parties.  

First published in 1935, The Green Child is among the strangest books you’ll ever read. It enchanted me, forcing me to believe that Olivero, a South American dictator, could fake his own assassination, return to his roots in England, and save a speechless translucent creature, the Green Child, from her sadistic husband. I revelled in the exquisite writing – Sir Herbert Read was a renowned stylist who penned the classic English Prose Style -- and the improbable’s being made real. At one time Norton Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard, Read called his novel a philosophical myth to which ‘all types of Fantasy should conform’. It was his only long fiction. One reviewer called it an ‘organic fusion of thought and imagination into a crystalline beauty’.

Translating this book from the French was a slow process, the slowest reading I have ever done, and some of the most rewarding. This book did not just return me to my pre-existing ideas; it changed my way of thinking permanently. Colson writes to us from a world that is full of unexpected possibilities for life, a “world within which many worlds might fit,” as the Zapatistas have it—possibilities for the better and the worse that are screened off from our view. Difficult, demanding reading, but it too suggests a way of living that is premised on finding good connections with others (ones that expand your “collective force”) and withdrawing from relations characterized by “error and sadness,” linking people to “the dominations that, internally and externally, chain them to their own misfortune.” In other words, Colson is drawing from the same Spinozan currents as Bergman and Montgomery, that… show more.

Transgender anarchist author Margaret Killjoy’s collection of short speculative fiction stories, We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow, is a stark contrast to the dazzling high-tech fantasies and cinematic adventures of my first three recommendations. Most of these stories are set in disturbingly plausible and not-at-all-distant futures, and veer into the territories of dark fantasy, gritty dystopianism, and atomspheric horror. No interplanetary space opera here; Killjoy’s protagonists are earthbound, anarchistic outcasts and misfits struggling to survive on the edges of society or in society’s ruins, in worlds gone unfathomably strange. And Killjoy writes it all beautifully, with a clarity of description that often left me stunned by its simple poetic power. This one’s for you if you like your speculative fiction close to the bone.