Commodifying your Dissent
Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler
by Thomas Frank

One of the most influential books I've read, this is the Baffler at its finest - essays that x-ray pop culture to expose its capitalist meat and bones. Everything from articles about the market co-opting rebel imagery and subcultures to an essay by Steve Albini (now legendary in punk circles) about how a rock band switching to a major label might be offered what looks like a sweet deal, include hundreds of thousands in advances, and still get screwed while the company gets rich off their backs. Theory at its best: readable, relevant, and completely engrossing.

History
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
by Adam Hochschild

A brief history of the last 100 years of Zaire/the Congo. The book details the enslaving of millions of Congolese citizens, the "exploration" of Zaire (ever hear the expression, "Dr. Livingston, I presume?"), the exploitation of the land and the people, and the change of power from the Belgian government to a dictator installed and controlled by the Belgian government and the US.

There are neat connections drawn out by the author. For example, a turn of the century Irish nationalist paralleled the struggle for an independent Congo with that of an independent Ireland, and fought for both. And before that, a former US slave traveled to the Congo and reported on the abuses of Belgian companies there; in writing a report on it, the same man coined the expression, "crimes against humanity."

History Class, High School
Lies My Teacher Told Me

A staple for anyone who slept through high school history class. This book goes over what we missed - basically every time the people in the form of labor unions, immigrants, people of color, the poor, and others got screwed by the system and fought back - and why.

Engaging and smart, this turns the old model of the heroic government and the rich taking care of the rest of us upside down. If you've ever laughed at a Helen Keller joke, this book is for you.

What Countries' Leaders We've Assassinated and Why
Endless Enemies
Jonathan Kwitny

Numerous case studies of US foreign policy stumbling through the cold war. In direct contrast to the "rational actor" theory of gov't decision making, Enemies shows the US acting capriciously and ultimately creating far more enemies, and more radical ones, than existed before.

Writing two days after the Pentagon/WTC attacks on the US, it seems timely to point out that the US aided rebels in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviets, only to alienate them in the 90s. What we reap from our short-sighted policy, ignorance, and pigheadedness is a world decidedly more dangerous. I believe this book explains more than the author would have imagined.

Cultural Relations
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

A beautiful book about a Hmong refugee family and their interactions with the US medical (and legal) establishment. A newborn daughter is born with severe epilepsy. Between different cultural beliefs and languages, neither meaningfully overcome, the family has to struggle to keep their child and sense of worth as human beings. Interesting especially because many of the doctors who treated their badly afflicted daughter wrote them off as unfit parents at best and almost deliberately killing their daughter at worst. Other doctors went to great lengths to help the child and her family, with mixed success.

What was most poignant for me was when the author interviewed the girl's mother after she was taken away by child protective services. The mother says that she can't do anything. The author tries to get around this by asking what she did in Vietnam, where the family is from. The mother insists she didn't do anything there, either. But when pressed she remembers that she got up while it was still dark outside, walked to a stream miles away, brought back two buckets of water, started a fire and cooked breakfast for the entire family while it was still dark outside, fed the animals, worked in the fields, took care of her children and cooked another meal before going to sleep. But stripped of the one piece of her identity that she still had faith in - taking care of her family - she saw herself as worthless then and now.

This book shows that there's more to immigrants coming to the US than Benetton diversity and empty platitudes about melting pots. You have struggles between new immigrants and the system and the winner isn't always the one that's right. In this case, the daughter survives nearly brain dead, but it's far from clear that her family was responsible.

Education/Teaching
Teaching to Transgress
by bell hooks

In my circle of friends, everyone's favorite book about teaching. hooks breaks down how to teach without feeling like you have to be
the source of all knowledge, meter-out of all discipline. Reading it also taught me, as a student, how my classes could have been better. No single book has influenced the way I do workshops/trainings more than this one.

Possibly more important than the content is the tone. hooks writes so that normal people can read her. It shouldn't be, but this is profoundly important. I find myself slipping into jargon or tortured prose all the time, and I make an effort for our (Midnight Special's) materials to be readable. What about people who don't give a shit? Or those who deliberately make their writing opaque (a la Gayatri Spivak, the cultural theorist everyone loves to hate, or at least criticize. Wanna make friends at a party of post-modernism majors? Me neither. But if you did, you'd make jokes at Spivak's expense - instant comradery and pomo street cred.)

Other People's Children
by Lisa Delpit

A book on how middle class college educated white teachers often, with the best intentions, fail their students in the inner city. Delpit's writing is clear, her stories beautiful, and her analysis right on. Going further, she has specific points on how to teach better, and how the system can be improved.

South African Mining
Last Empire: De Beers, diamonds, and the world
by Stefan Kanfer

The Rituals Behind the Rational at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab
Nuclear Rites
by Hugh Gusterson

A fairly readable anthropology of the Livermore labs. Instead of assuming that they're a completely rational establishment that does everything for a reason, Gusterson goes in like a 19th century Brit discovering an exotic African tribe. He reveals elaborate and terrifying background checks (that almost everyone passes) as hazing rituals, the split identity most scientists develop to rationalize the fact they're creating weapons of mass destruction, and more. #