100 books like Durruti in the Spanish Revolution

By Abel Paz, Chuck Morse (translator),

Here are 100 books that Durruti in the Spanish Revolution fans have personally recommended if you like Durruti in the Spanish Revolution. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Akana Phenix Author Of The Empire Wars

From my list on oppression for young adults.

Why am I passionate about this?

Visceral, transformative books have the capacity to improve lives. I am impassioned about books of oppression because of their ability to lend a voice to unspeakable, excruciating accounts of subjugation. Voices that might’ve otherwise went unheard or not as deeply understood as within the integral pages of a book to readers. Therefore, I believe it's important to recommend life-changing books to the youth to inform them of world oppression. As they, themselves, enter into responsibility and power. Whether it’s through brilliant, allegorical fiction or pivotal nonfiction, we can educate the future of humanity itself. Together, we can all foster a better world.

Akana's book list on oppression for young adults

Akana Phenix Why did Akana love this book?

This is a non-fiction history read that covers the violent genocide, extreme labor, horrific exploitation, and racism faced by the Congolese people under Belgium's reign of terror in colonization. The book is eye-opening and heartwrenching, particularly for both those of Congolese heritage like myself, and those unaware of Belgium's mass slaughter and torture of an estimated 20 million Congolese victims.

The crimes against humanity of King Leopold II of Belgium should not go untold or unknown. This is an incredibly important book to illustrate, on a smaller scale, the larger crisis faced today in Africa due to colonization, overexploitation, and genocide. It is a vital read for all ages and especially young adults in higher education.

By Adam Hochschild,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked King Leopold's Ghost as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, King Leopold's Ghost is the true and haunting account of Leopold's brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver.

In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce…


Book cover of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Shirin M. Rai Author Of Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring

From my list on social reproduction and the costs of maintenance of life.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an academic and writer based in the UK. I have always wondered why capitalism claims to know the price of everything but the costs of nothing, unless it gets in the way of increased profit. I have been puzzling over gender inequalities in the political economy of our global society for many years now. This is not only an academic interest but a personal one; the rich buy in the labour of others and the poor get depleted more and faster. I wonder what our world would feel like if this labour of life-making was equally distributed, and valued as it should be.

Shirin's book list on social reproduction and the costs of maintenance of life

Shirin M. Rai Why did Shirin love this book?

A tour de force! This is an amazing book that takes a historical view to explain the story of women’s exclusion from public life and the physical and epistemic violence they experienced through the witch trials in Europe.

I would never have put these two elements together–bringing witch trials into view to help us understand the exclusion of women from the political economy of everyday life. This, Federici argues, led to the restructuring of household relations and the role of women in them, which in turn reflected the changing needs of society with the rise of capitalism.

I found this book illuminating and inspiring as it also tells us about the struggles of women against the shifts in their roles. 

By Silvia Federici,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Caliban and the Witch as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A groundbreaking work . . . Federici has become a crucial figure for . . . a new generation of feminists' Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room

A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist…


Book cover of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

Jared Davidson Author Of Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920

From my list on radical history that rocked my world.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a reader, I want to be thrown into the heady world of revolution, to learn how everyday people made history, to see what they saw and feel what they felt. And I want a book that challenges mainstream narratives of the past. Radical history does this through gripping storytelling and revealing hidden histories of power. As a writer that tries to shine a light on lesser-known aspects of New Zealand’s past, these five books are both my ‘how-to’ and inspiration. I love to share the stories of people who are often left out of history but nonetheless made it. And being an archivist means questions of power and memory are always lurking.

Jared's book list on radical history that rocked my world

Jared Davidson Why did Jared love this book?

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.

By Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Many-Headed Hydra as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, labourers, market women and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history. The Many-Headed Hydra recounts their stories in a sweeping history of the role of the dispossessed in the making of the modern world.


Book cover of Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

James E. Crisp Author Of Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett's Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution

From my list on history books written from hidden, elusive, and mysterious sources.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am passionate about bringing back to life persons from the past who have been forgotten, misunderstood, or even deliberately mischaracterized. In order to get to the truth, there are a host of myths that must be shattered or discarded. Most of the histories that I have written have done precisely this–showing the fallacy of familiar myths and discovering the hidden truths about people and events that have been distorted, often by some of the most popular literature. In order to achieve these results, I have had to spend years in “boring” archives in order to reveal people and events that are never boring.

James' book list on history books written from hidden, elusive, and mysterious sources

James E. Crisp Why did James love this book?

I was blown away by this book because it spoke to my own efforts to find voices from the past that had been silenced, sometimes for centuries, by those who did not want certain stories to be told. Sometimes, the silencing was by legal suppression or even outright murder.

We’ve all heard that history is written by the winners, but how often do we think about the libraries and archives that are created by the winners, and how often the losers’ stories are kept out of these repositories? Even when scattered evidence is found, it is usually ignored, not only by the historians who write the approved versions of the past but also by the readers who fail to recognize inconvenient truths when they are confronted by them.

By Michel-Rolph Trouillot,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Silencing the Past as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Now part of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck

The 20th anniversary edition of a pioneering classic that explores the contexts in which history is produced—now with a new foreword by renowned scholar Hazel Carby
 
Placing the West’s failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution—the most successful slave revolt in history—alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.

This modern classic resides at the intersection of history, anthropology, Caribbean, African-American, and post-colonial studies, and…


Book cover of Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1890-1910

Kirwin R. Shaffer Author Of Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion

From my list on Latin American anarchism and anti-authoritarianism.

Why am I passionate about this?

As someone who studies and writes about Latin American anarchism for a living, I’ve encountered no shortage of influential historical accounts written by scholars and activists writing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English during the past sixty years. My “best of” list includes English-language histories that reflect important shifts in how people began to study and write about anarchism beginning in the 1990s. Before then—and continuing up to today to some extent—historians often focused on the role of anarchists in a country’s labor movement. Today, historians increasingly explore both the cultural and transnational dimensions of Latin American anarchism. In these studies, authors frequently explore the roles of and attitudes toward women in anarchist politics.

Kirwin's book list on Latin American anarchism and anti-authoritarianism

Kirwin R. Shaffer Why did Kirwin love this book?

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.

By Juan Suriano,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Paradoxes of Utopia as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An engaging historical look at fin de siécle Buenos Aires that brings to life the vibrant culture behind one of the world’s largest anarchist movements: the radical schools, newspapers, theaters, and social clubs that made revolution a way of life. Cultural history in the best sense, Paradoxes of Utopia explores how a revolutionary ideology was woven into the ordinary lives of tens of thousands of people, creating a complex tapestry of symbols, rituals, and daily practices that supported—and indeed created the possibility of—the Argentine labor movement.

Juan Suriano is a professor of social history at the University of Buenos Aires.


Book cover of Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States

Kirwin R. Shaffer Author Of Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion

From my list on Latin American anarchism and anti-authoritarianism.

Why am I passionate about this?

As someone who studies and writes about Latin American anarchism for a living, I’ve encountered no shortage of influential historical accounts written by scholars and activists writing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English during the past sixty years. My “best of” list includes English-language histories that reflect important shifts in how people began to study and write about anarchism beginning in the 1990s. Before then—and continuing up to today to some extent—historians often focused on the role of anarchists in a country’s labor movement. Today, historians increasingly explore both the cultural and transnational dimensions of Latin American anarchism. In these studies, authors frequently explore the roles of and attitudes toward women in anarchist politics.

Kirwin's book list on Latin American anarchism and anti-authoritarianism

Kirwin R. Shaffer Why did Kirwin love this book?

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.  

By Christopher J. Castañeda (editor), Montse Feu (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Writing Revolution as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, the anarchist effort to promote free thought, individual liberty, and social equality relied upon an international Spanish-language print network. These channels for journalism and literature promoted anarchist ideas and practices while fostering transnational solidarity and activism from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles to Barcelona. Christopher J. Castaneda and Montse Feu edit a collection that examines many facets of Spanish-language anarchist history. Arranged chronologically and thematically, the essays investigate anarchist print culture's transatlantic origins; Latina/o labor-oriented anarchism in the United States; the anarchist print presence in locales like Mexico's borderlands and Steubenville, Ohio; the…


Book cover of Twelve Fingers: Biography of an Anarchist

Kirwin R. Shaffer Author Of Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion

From my list on Latin American anarchism and anti-authoritarianism.

Why am I passionate about this?

As someone who studies and writes about Latin American anarchism for a living, I’ve encountered no shortage of influential historical accounts written by scholars and activists writing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English during the past sixty years. My “best of” list includes English-language histories that reflect important shifts in how people began to study and write about anarchism beginning in the 1990s. Before then—and continuing up to today to some extent—historians often focused on the role of anarchists in a country’s labor movement. Today, historians increasingly explore both the cultural and transnational dimensions of Latin American anarchism. In these studies, authors frequently explore the roles of and attitudes toward women in anarchist politics.

Kirwin's book list on Latin American anarchism and anti-authoritarianism

Kirwin R. Shaffer Why did Kirwin love this book?

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.

By Jo Soares,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Twelve Fingers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?


A burlesque smorgasbord of international high jinks—the “biography” of a hapless, twelve-fingered, would-be assassin who lurches from Sarajevo to Paris to Hollywood to Chicago to Rio, leaving high-stakes chaos in his wake.
Our hero, Dimitri Borja Korozec, is born in the late 1800s to a Brazilian contortionist mother and a fanatically nationalist Serbian linotypist father.

Dimitri enrolls in a training school for assassins, where he excels—except for his troubling propensity for fouling things up at the last moment. Part Carlos the Jackal, part Woody Allen’s Zelig, part Inspector Clouseau, and part Forrest Gump, Dimitri is a schlemiel of an assassin…


Book cover of We Won't Be Here Tomorrow: And Other Stories

Nick Walker Author Of Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities

From my list on neuroqueer speculative fiction.

Why am I passionate about this?

My first passion, as a youngster, was speculative fiction—stories and comics that set the imagination ablaze with visions of wondrous possibilities and impossibilities. Later, my experiences of being queer, transgender, and autistic led me to an academic career in which I helped create the field of Neurodiversity Studies and something called Neuroqueer Theory (which is what you get when you mix Queer Theory and neurodiversity together and shake vigorously). These days I’m back to writing fiction, including the urban fantasy webcomic Weird Luck, and I’m thrilled to find myself part of an emerging wave of neuroqueer speculative fiction. Here are some of the best so far...

Nick's book list on neuroqueer speculative fiction

Nick Walker Why did Nick love this book?

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.

By Margaret Killjoy,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked We Won't Be Here Tomorrow as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Death cults, queer love, and the end of everything.

 

Spaceships, man-eating lesbian mermaids, swords, spears, demons, ghouls, thieves, hitchhikers, and life in the margins. Margaret Killjoy’s stories have appeared for years in the science fiction and fantasy magazines both major and indie. Here, we have collected the best previously published work along with brand new material. Ranging in theme and tone, these imaginative tales bring the reader on a wild and moving ride. They’ll encounter a hacker who programs drones to troll CEOs into quitting; a group of LARPers who decide to live as orcs in the burned forests of…


Book cover of A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze

Jesse Cohn Author Of Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848-2011

From my list on how might one live an anarchist life.

Why am I passionate about this?

I knew I was an anti-authoritarian before I had words for it, and my education in social justice has been long and slow. I have been researching and writing about anarchism for the better part of three decades, and am now a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Anarchy is a subject that engages me both at the level of intellectual passion, what lights up my mind, and on a visceral level, in my revulsion at the inequalities and iniquities in this world and my yearning for a fully emancipated way of life.

Jesse's book list on how might one live an anarchist life

Jesse Cohn Why did Jesse love this book?

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 itpossibilities 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…

By Daniel Colson, Jesse Cohn (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Is the thought of Gilles Deleuze secretly linked to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's declaration: "I am an anarchist"? Has anarchism, for more than a century and a half, been secretly Deleuzian? In the guise of a playfully unorthodox lexicon, sociologist Daniel Colson presents an exploration of hidden affinities between the great philosophical heresies and "a thought too scandalous to take its place in the official edifice of philosophy," with profound implications for the way we understand social movements.


Book cover of Anarchafeminism

Jesse Cohn Author Of Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848-2011

From my list on how might one live an anarchist life.

Why am I passionate about this?

I knew I was an anti-authoritarian before I had words for it, and my education in social justice has been long and slow. I have been researching and writing about anarchism for the better part of three decades, and am now a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Anarchy is a subject that engages me both at the level of intellectual passion, what lights up my mind, and on a visceral level, in my revulsion at the inequalities and iniquities in this world and my yearning for a fully emancipated way of life.

Jesse's book list on how might one live an anarchist life

Jesse Cohn Why did Jesse love this book?

Bottici is another such friend at first reading, another partisan of the Spinozan current, but one deeply immersed in the feminist thought that Colson regrettably ignores. Hers is a fully intersectional feminism, attending especially to the margins of society, where its freaks and pariahs live. Like Colson, she offers opportunities for difficult thinking that reward us with new vistas, new possibilities for life.

By Chiara Bottici,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Anarchafeminism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

How can we be sure the oppressed do not become oppressors in their turn? How can we create a feminism that doesn't turn into yet another tool for oppression? It has become commonplace to argue that, in order to fight the subjugation of women, we have to unpack the ways different forms of oppression intersect with one another: class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and ecology, to name only a few. By arguing that there is no single factor, or arche, explaining the oppression of women, Chiara Bottici proposes a radical anarchafeminist philosophy inspired by two major claims: that there is…


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