I am a presidential historian with a particular focus on their deaths, public mourning, and the places we commemorate them. My interest in what I like to think of as “the final chapter of each president’s amazing story” grew out of frustration with traditional biographies that end abruptly when the president dies, and I believe my books pick up where others leave off. More than a moribund topic, I find the presidential deaths and public reaction to be both fascinating and critical to understanding their humanity and place in history at the time of their passing and how each of their legacies evolved over time.
While Candace Millard’s epic book of 20th President James Garfield’s assassination helped bring the old story to a new audience, 25th President William McKinley’s assassination remains little known. Beloved in his time, perhaps McKinley’s light was dimmed in the long shadow of his larger-than-life successor, Theodore Roosevelt, but it’s a story that people should know, and Scott Miller tells it masterfully.
Miller’s book illuminates the first tragedy of the new century and deserves a spot on the bookshelves of anyone interested in American history.
A SWEEPING TALE OF TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICA AND THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCES THAT BROUGHT TWO MEN TOGETHER ONE FATEFUL DAY
In 1901, as America tallied its gains from a period of unprecedented imperial expansion, an assassin’s bullet shattered the nation’s confidence. The shocking murder of President William McKinley threw into stark relief the emerging new world order of what would come to be known as the American Century. The President and the Assassin is the story of the momentous years leading up to that event, and of the very different paths that brought together two of the most compelling figures of the…
I’ve been passionate about Edward Abbey since I read Desert Solitaire in 1994.By 2010, I decided to write a biography on Abbey,Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, which allowed me to research and explore Abbey. I interviewed his great friends, including Jack Loeffler, Doug Peacock, Ken Sleight, and David Petersen. I visited Abbey’s special collections library and read his master’s thesis on anarchism and an unpublished novel. I visited his first home in Pennsylvania and many of his Desert Southwest homes. Along the way, I found the spirit of Abbey and the American Southwest.Finding Abbeywon the National Outdoor Book Award.
Confessions of a Barbarianis an edited collection of Abbey’s private journals.
Across these pages, we get so many of the stories that never made it into an Ed Abbey novel or memoir. Instead, we see Abbey in all his glory and failures. We see Abbey at his emotional best and at his neediest. We see Abbey wrestling over anarchism, philosophy, and environmentalism. We see the complexity of a great writer and thinker.
Abbey’s “scribblings” offer some of the most complex and beautiful writing by Abbey and act, more or less, as his autobiography.
A collection of excerpts from the private journals of an eccentric environmentalist features his notes, philosophies, and character sketches, chronicling his lifelong struggle to preserve the Southwestern wilderness. 20,000 first printing.
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.
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.
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…
One of my long-standing interests, as a political philosopher, has been to examine the deployment of state power and the state forms (what I call states of affairs) the capitalist mode of production takes in order to preserve its economic order. Since I completed my doctorate, which was on the articulation of settler-colonial power in relationship to remaining settler states, I have largely been invested in thinking politics: how dominant politics maintain the current order, how counter-hegemonic politics disrupt this order.
The definitive radical materialist analysis of the state, and a book that taught me the importance of clear thinking and writing. Opposing liberal conceptions of the state as a social contract that reconciles class contradiction, Lenin elaborates upon and synthesizes Engels’ conception of the state as a machine of class dictatorship that arises due to the fundamental irreconcilability of class antagonism. Written after Lenin studied Hegel’s Logic, The State and Revolution is an elegant piece of dialectical thought. In opposition to both the social democratic and anarchist approaches to the problem of the state, Lenin argues that the bourgeois state should be smashed in order to build a proletarian state, the latter of which must be aimed at withering away along with classes and class antagonisms.
Lenin's classic work on the state, clarifying the differences with the opportunists of various stripes. He shows how the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was raised by Marx and Engels after the Paris Commune.
In a sense, I have been working on the material for my book, Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths, for my entire life. The 38 short chapters that comprise it span a range of topics: alphabetically, from ambition and anxiety, through love and mathematics, to war and youth. For whatever it is worth, I have had first-hand experience (in three languages, on three continents) learning, researching, teaching, enjoying, suffering, and fighting — in other words, living — all but one of them (the exception is one that technically cannot be lived through, but can still be pondered and written about). My five recommendations reflect this life-long interest in the human condition, which I am excited to share with you.
A better world is possible — just not through the kind of progress touted by liberal politicians. In this 1982 collection, Bookchin sketches such a new world, based on his concept of social ecology — a prescient integration of the people’s desires for a better life, for personal freedom, and for coexistence, mutual aid, and respect.
“The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human.” With this succinct formulation, Murray Bookchin launches his most ambitious work, The Ecology of Freedom. An engaging and extremely readable book of breathtaking scope, its inspired synthesis of ecology, anthropology and political theory traces our conflicting legacies of hierarchy and freedom from the first emergence of human culture to today’s globalized capitalism, constantly pointing the way to a sane, sustainable ecological future.
Murray Bookchin, cofounder of the Institute for Social Ecology, has been an active voice in the ecology and…
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...
Seriously, I’m not exaggerating, and I say this as someone who’s read all the works of Philip K. Dick:Wallflower Assassin is without exception the weirdest, wildest, most psychedelic, and gleefully anarchistic book it’s ever been my pleasure to encounter. Our narrator, Jack, has near-total amnesia, induced by a trauma he can’t remember (because amnesia). He’s stumbling randomly between alternate universes, stalked and manipulated by agents of the sinister Reality Patrol. Oh, and he’s not in his own body––his mind has somehow been transferred into the body of a deadly former Reality Patrol assassin named Max. And Max’s mind is still in there, too, disoriented and annoyed at Jack’s presence... And all of this only just begins to scratch the surface of how weird it gets.
Wallflower Assassin follows a confused killer on a kaleidoscopic journey through a series of half-familiar worlds. Uncertain of the cause of his chaotic interdimensional travels, fleeting hints from his uncanny intuition suggest he is at the mercy of some unseen foe. As he drifts between drug-hazed parties and scenes of horrific violence, he gradually pieces together parts of the scheme against him, until he uncovers the dreadful secret behind it all…. This second edition includes all-new original illustrations by Skinner, Michael Bukowski, Lenka Simeckova, Builtfromsketch, Brandon Kawashima, Euan Boyd, and Mike Bennewitz.
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.
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.
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…
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...
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.
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…
We have backgrounds in writing, activism, and being messed up, so making The Sad Bastard Cookbook together made sense. Our inspiration was partly realizing that most of the recipes purporting to be “good for mental health” require a laundry list of unusual ingredients and a drawer full of spoons, and partly meeting someone who didn't know about cooking eggs in instant ramen. So we crowdsourced recipes from our community, added our naturally witty, radically progressive commentary, and roped in Marten Norr as illustrator. The ebook's free—we know that dealing with poverty, overwork, mental health issues, physical disability, and exhaustion is hard enough without scraping up money for your emotional-support cookbook.
Not to be confused with the more famous Anarchist Cookbook, or the other Anarchist Cookbook, this one does contain a few things that might be considered “recipes” in the broadest sense of the word.
At somewhere between 400-600 pages (depending on the edition), it can also double as a brick to throw during a riot. It contains a wealth of “recipes,” from the very practical (setting up a Food Not Bombs, legal support, and media relations) to the oddly specific (making your own musical instruments and turning your bicycle into a record player).
Perhaps one of the most useful features is the “Accounts,” which describe real world successful—and unsuccessful—actions by the writers, along with analyses of what these activists did well and what they might improve upon for next time.
Beautifully designed A-Z of the totality of revolutionary politics. This brand new CrimethInc book is the action guide - the direct action guide. From affinity groups to wheatpasting, coalition building, hijacking events, mental health, pie-throwing, shoplifting, stenciling, supporting survivors of domestic violence, surviving a felony trial, torches, and whole bunch more. Incredible design, and lots of graphics give it that hip situ feel. Loads to read, to think about, and to do. At 650 pages, you could always throw the damn book at a suitable target. What are you waiting for?
I spent most of my life in the western United States. Born and raised in northern Idaho, a professorial position attracted me to Tucson, Arizona, the long-time home of Edward Abbey. Cactus Ed said it best: “The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.” Upon reading books by Abbey and others writing about the American West, I became a defender of the idea of wilderness.
The Journey Home is a fitting sequel to Desert Solitaire in which Abbey makes a compelling case for saving what remains of the western United States. A long-time “desert rat,” Abbey lives his message of anarchism with a profound sense of humor. My exposure to Abbey’s writings while I was in college contributed to my love of the American West, where I grew up, and also contributed to my desire to pursue anarchism.
The Journey Home ranges from the surreal cityscapes of Hoboken and Manhattan to the solitary splendor of the deserts and mountains of the Southwest. It is alive with ranchers, dam builders, kissing bugs, and mountain lions. In a voice edged with chagrin, Edward Abbey offers a portrait of the American West that we'll not soon forget, offering us the observations of a man who left the urban world behind to think about the natural world and the myths buried therein.
Abbey, our foremost "ecological philosopher," has a voice like no other. He can be wildly funny, ferociously acerbic, and unexpectedly…
