Book Recommendations

We've collected book recommendations from our current members! If you have any books that you think should be added, send us a message!

We've always understood the Cold War as a political conflict between the USSR and the United States for the most part. However, that particular narrative contains lapses in history that can only be possible through America's imperial crusades, which leaves the world with some sort of collective amnesia. This book fills an important gap in history, particularly the systematic destruction of  budding left-wing governments in the Third World, where even neutral countries are seen as enemies. US-backed military coups to destroy the left are often violent and bloody. As an Indonesian of Chinese descent, the 1965-1966 anticommunist purge left us with an intergenerational trauma that remains unresolved.

The Jakarta Method makes me nostalgic. Not for the bloody massacres but for the time when my country had the largest unarmed communist party in the world because they believed that peaceful resolution is possible. It makes me think of the hopeful leaders that got together at the Bandung Asian-African conference in 1955 to talk about decolonization, before those dreams were instantly crushed by US intervention and replaced with crony capitalism

- Jess Kim

Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts is an essential read that explains how Black Women’s bodies have been, and continue to be, controlled. Mentioning forced sterilization, forced breeding, and the idea of “welfare queens,” Roberts explains how the fight for reproductive justice is as important as ever. This is a book that everyone needs to read, especially if you want to engage in anti-racist work.

- Em Newton

I’m currently reading Capital Volume 1. In his analysis of capitalism, Marx identities the key features of said economic, social, and political system and why, even in a perfectly functioning capitalist world order, that system is inherently combustible and instabile.

- Jake Otto

I am currently rereading this book because the first time I read it I read it really fast and I think I just need to let it sit with me. Also I love this book. It’s a horror book that is essentially an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) as a book.

- Rylan Casciato

Got tired reading about boomers with questionable drug and sexual motives in middle America.

- Carlos Lee