Novels & (page-turning) Memoirs of Revolutionary History

[ultraviolet]

Hello everyone! I'm new to this board and excited to be here amongst fellow anarchists.

I've been an anarchist for about two years and want to become more knowledgeable about moments of history which are of great importance to anarchists and revolutionaries. For example: the Spanish civil war / failed revolution, the failed Ukraine revolution, the Paris Commune, etc.

To learn about this history, I plan to read historical fiction, memoirs, and biographies. I'm hoping some of you will be able to help provide a list of good novels, memoirs, and bios that will help me educate myself on the history of class struggle. (With biographies, try to choose ones that aren't too dry or academic... preferably page-turners, please!)

Some books that are already on my list include:
> Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)
> A Girl Among the Anarchists (Isabel Meredith)
> Haymarket (Martin Duberman)
> How We Shall Bring About the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Cooperative Commonwealth (Pouget & Emile Pataud)

Hope nobody thinks that I'm being intellectually lazy or that I'm not invested enough in my education to read academic books. I have inattentive-type ADHD, which makes reading academic texts a time consuming struggle. And I already have my hands full with various academic texts that I must read in order to learn about anarchist theory.

Thanks for your help! : )

Ultraviolet

[ronan]

Welcome to the boards. Reading good novels and biographies is a really great way to learn about history if you ask me. I would add:

Emma Goldman - Living My Life (a good picture of the anarchist movement in the late/19th early 20th century)
Bill Ayers - Fugitive Days (memoirs of a member of the Weather Underground, not an anarchist but excellently written and a good picture and critique of the anti-war and counter-cultural movement in the 60s)
Q - Italian novel about the revolutionary currents that emerged in Central Europe during the Reformation

[snowball]

How We Shall Bring About the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Cooperative Commonwealth (Pouget & Emile Pataud)

WIN

Also for page turners I would recommend Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack by Skirda

[ultraviolet]

thanks for your suggestions! i've added them to the list. please keep 'em coming

[nate]

I second Q.
I would also suggest Manituana, by Wu Ming. It's about Iroquois who sided with the English during the American war of independence and is basically all true.
1919, by John Dos Passos, about that year in US history.
We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! by Dario Fo.
Orgasmo Adulto Escapes from the Zoo by Franca Rame (Fo may have co-written these, I don't remember.)
The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini.

Those last three have a lot on radical movements in Italy in the 1970s and were written by participants in those movements and most of what happens in them actually happened.

There are also some very good narratives of life under slavery in the US and escape to freedom, which in my opinion is an important revolutionary tradition. I'd recommend the narrative of Williams Wells Brown, and John Parker's His Promised Land.

I haven't read it yet but a friend whose judgment I trust (about books and about politics) says that John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle is a great book for radicals.

[flaneur]

For revolutionary memoirs you might be interested in Out of the Night: The Memoir of Richard Julius Herman Krebs alias Jan Valtin.  It's available as Google book if you want to try before you buy. 
Although, according to one reviewer, Krebs' status in the Communist Party hierarchy was exaggerated the story is largely factual and quite fascinating.     

[dashoflime]

Victor Serge wrote some real page turners too:
Try Birth of Our Power or The Case of Comrade Tuleyev.

[digit]

This may not be what you're looking for (not history or a memoir), but...

I just started reading At the Cafe by Errico Malatesta.  You can get a pdf here: http://www.zinelibrary.info/cafe-errico-malatesta

It's a series of dialogues from a cafe Malatesta would go to while he was in hiding, and it's an argument for anarchism. 

[TakePossession]

Not explicitly anarchist, but I really appreciated Days and Nights of Love and War by Eduardo Galeano. 

On a similar note, I didn't so much appreciate the Crimethinc book, which so obviously stole this name and was also so obviously very inferior.

[prec@riat]

Some more biographies and histories (sometimes "academic" but nevertheless "page-turning" and interesting IMHO)

Black Reconstruction in America by WEB Du Bois
The world and a very small place in Africa  by Donald R. Wright
Seattle General Strike - http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/strike/
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying - Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin; Manning Marable (foreward)
the Many Headed Hydra - Marcus Rediker & Peter Linebaugh
Caliban and the Witch - Sylvia Federici
Assata - Assata Shakur
Sabate: An Extraordinary Guerrilla - Antonio Téllez Solá
Granny Made me an Anarchist - Stuart Christie
Direct Action - Ann Hansen

classic libertarian socialist/anarchist novelists:
B.Traven
Ba Jin (Pa Chin)

for @ history ...also - Paul Avrich

[joseph_iww]

Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, put out in english by AK Press, was the page turningest revolutionary account I've yet read.  Good luck!

[randy]

Great thread.  Q and In Dubious Battle are in my local library, and so make the "definite" list. 

If not too obvious I would add The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, and also the Reconstruction era novel Freedom Road by Howard Fast. 

[NeAnt]

Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisee Reclus.

[Sabotage]

Expect Resistance - CrimethInc

 

(it actually was sorta page turning when i did read it, i don't know if i'd think so now)

ps: evasion too. that was a page turner!

[werealldoodshey]

I will add "Memoirs of a Revolutionist" by Vera Figner.