Book Recommendations

This is a list of books that Cushbomb has recommended or mentioned on air.

## **History**

*The Long Twentieth Century*, Giovanni Arrighi (2010)

*Stayin' Alive*, Jefferson R. Cowie (2010)

*NATO's Secret Armies*, Daniele Ganser (2004)

* A "dry and academic and more grounded" book about Operation GLADIO that looks at it "broader than simply Italy, like more into it as a NATO program of a network of cells" across Europe. Link to free PDF.

*The Age of Extremes*, Eric Hobsbawm (1994)

*What Hath God Wrought*, Daniel Walker Howe (2007)

* Mentioned 11.25.20

*Big Trouble*, J. Anthony Lukas (1997)

*Suburban Warriors*, Lisa McGirr (2001)

*CHAOS*, Tom O'Neill (2019)

*Blackshirts and Reds*, Michael Parenti (1997)

*Before the Storm*, Rick Perlstein (2001)

*Nixonland*, Rick Perlstein (2008)

*The Invisible Bridge*, Rick Perlstein (2014)

*Reaganland*, Rick Perlstein (2020)

*The Great Leveler,* Walter Scheidel (2017)

*Escape From Rome*, Walter Scheidel (2019)

*Operation GLADIO*, Paul L. Williams (2015)

* A more "pulpy" book about Operation GLADIO which "reads like the skeleton to a James Ellroy novel."

*The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln*, Sean Wilentz (2005)

* Mentioned 11.25.20

*The Strange Career of Jim Crow*, C. Vann Woodward (1955)

* "The thesis is that Jim Crow laws were a direct response to populist attempts to create an interracial political coalition." (11.30.20)

*The Weimar Republic*, Eberhard Kolb (1980)

* Mentioned 5.1.21
* The Weimar Republic by Eberhard Kolb Book Club

### Reconstruction

On the 12.02.20 stream, Matt expressed interest in starting an informal book club on the history of the Reconstruction, in service of his larger goal of writing a counterfactual alternative history of the era. These were the books he mentioned during that discussion:

*Black Reconstruction*, W. E. B. Du Bois (1935)

*Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877*, Eric Foner (1988)

* Reconstruction Book Club

*The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics*, James Oakes (2007)

* Matt mentioned wanting to read a book by Oakes — not 100% sure he was referring to this one, but it seems to be his best-known and most relevant

*The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896*, Richard White (2017)

* The Republic for Which It Stands Book Club

### Spanish Civil War

Given on the 4.13.21 stream (around 1 hr, 2 min) after someone asked for book recommendations on the Spanish Civil War.

*The Battle for Spain*, Antony Beevor (1989)

* Read if you are interested in the military history of the conflict

*Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War*, Ronald Fraser (1979)

* If you are interested in the intellectual history of the period, this contains interviews with people on both sides of the war, all the way through the heirarchy. Describes how they went about collectivizing the economy

*Homage to Catalonia*, George Orwell (1938)

* Personal account of the war

*The Spanish Cockpit*, Franz Borkenau (1937)

* Personal account of the war

## Fiction

*Cloudsplitter*, Russell Banks (1998)

* A fictional memoir of John Brown from the point of view of his son. According to Matt, very useful for understanding the kind of pre-modern mentality that gave John Brown the resolve to fight for his ideals, which doesn't really exist anymore on the American left.

*Lenin Lives!*, Philip Cunliffe (2017)

*American Tabloid*, James Ellroy (1995)

*Ulysses*, James Joyce (1922)

*The Dark Tower* series*,* Stephen King

*Blood Meridian*, Cormac McCarthy (1985)

*Moby Dick*, Herman Melville (1851)

*Against the Day*, Thomas Pynchon (2006)

*Red Plenty*, Francis Spufford (2010)

*Infinite Jest*, David Foster Wallace (1996)

*Oryx and Crake*, Margaret Atwood (2003)

*The Ministry for the Future*, Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)

## Buddhism

*Mindfulness in Plain English*, Henepola Gunaratana (1991)

* "...[*Mindfulness in Plain English*] is a very good entryway to the practice of meditation and, essentially, trying in any way to shut your fucking mind off, which is the hardest thing in the world." (08.14.20)

*The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching*, Thích Nhất Hạnh (1997)

## Other

*A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File*, Stephanie Caruana (1975)

*The Culture of Make Believe*, Derrick Jensen (2002)

* Matt called it the most subversive book he has ever read: "...It was such a shock reading [*The Culture of Make Believe*], and it was such a challenge, that I ended up having to break down and reconfigure a number of things that I had held as assumptions. And even though I don't think that he's right in any kind of removed, objective sense, I feel like — for me, anyways — his contribution to my intellectual development was very useful." (08.13.20)

*The Mothman Prophecies*, John Keel (1975)

## List of Favorite Books (2017)

From a 2017 Twitter thread, linked here. Listed in order posted.

*The Illuminatus! Trilogy*, Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson (1975)

*Nixonland*, Rick Perlstein (2008)

*Blood's a Rover*, James Ellroy (2009)

*World War Z*, Max Brooks (2006)

*U.S.!*, Chris Bachelder (2006)

*The Anatomy of Fascism*, Robert O. Paxton (2004)

*The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson*, Robert A. Caro (2012)

*The Year of the Flood*, Margaret Atwood (2009)

*Seeing Like a State*, James C. Scott (1998)

*In Persuasion Nation*, George Saunders (2006)

## See also

Food of Christmanness

The Cushbomb Lexicon

Cushvlog Book Clubs