May 27_2007 – What I’m Reading These Days

Please don’t get the wrong idea here; I read what I’m interested in or curious about or has been recommended to me or is on a topic or subject I’m working on, and doesn’t mean that I embrace any ideas the books might contain. So with that noted, here’s the list.

Buda's Wagon: A Brief History Of the Car Bomb
By Mike Davis
This book, “… [t]races its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies—particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan—in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. [Mike] Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with ‘rings of steel’ against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.” (AK Press blurb)

How Nonviolence Protects The State
By Peter Gelderloos
“People working for social change face plenty of difficult questions, but sometimes matters of strategy and tactics receive low priority. Among many North American activists, the role of nonviolence as the default mode of struggle bears little scrutiny. Is nonviolence effective at ending systems of oppression? How is nonviolence connected to white privilege? Is militancy naturally macho, or does pacifism reinforce the same power dynamics as patriarchy? Ultimately, does nonviolence protect the State? How Nonviolence Protects the State brings existing criticisms of nonviolence, and several new ones, together into one book, in an attempt to illuminate one of the most severe roadblocks to social change today.” (AK Press blurb)

Durruti in the Spanish Revolution
By Chuck Morse (Translator) and Abel Paz
“In this new and unabridged translation of the definitive biography of Spanish revolutionary and military strategist, Buenaventura Durruti, Abel Paz has given us much more than an account of a single man's life. Durruti in the Spanish Revolution is as much the chronicle of an entire nation and of a tumultuous historical era. Paz seamlessly weaves intimate biographical details of Durruti's life—his progression from factory worker and father to bank robber, political exile and, eventually, revolutionary leader—with extensive historical background, behind-the-scenes governmental intrigue, and blow-by-blow accounts of major battles and urban guerrilla warfare. Written with a thorough and sympathetic understanding of the anarchist ideals that motivated Durruti, this is an amazing and exhaustive study of an incredible man and his life-long fight against totalitarianism in both its capitalist and Stalinist forms.

Includes an afterword by José Luis Gutierréz Molina's on Abel Paz's life and the historiography of the Spanish Revolution.” (AK Press blurb)

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. " - Thomas Carlyle