Dan’s Top 25 Books

by | Featured, Talks & Charts

Dear Family and Friends,

In late October 2022, Godfather Denny May asked me to make a list of the top 25 books that influenced my life in some way.

I made up the list. It’s in a somewhat chronological order. I know I should annotate it in some small way, but one step at a time.

Here’s the list.

—Dan

Twenty-five Books for Denny May

  1. American Power and the New Mandarins by Noam Chomsky
  2. Autobiography of Malcolm X
  3. Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Vine Deloria
  4. Asylums by Erving Goffman
  5. Post Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin
  6. Where and When I Enter by Paula Giddings
  7. Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank and File Union by James Mattles and James Higgins
  8. The Cold War Against Labor (Vol. One and Two)  by Ann Fangin Ginger and David Christiano
  9. Under the Fifth Sun by Earl Shorris
  10. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution by John Womack
  11. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Friere
  12. Who Built America? (Vol. One and Two). Herbert Gutman
  13. Origins of the Civil Rights Movement by Aldon Morris
  14. The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn
  15. The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
  16. The Art of War by Sun Tzu (Translated by Samuel B. Griffith)
  17. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
  18. The Peace to End all Peace by David Fromkin
  19. Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker
  20. The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings
  21. The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski.
  22. The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science by Armand Marie Leroi
  23. Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew
  24. We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O’Toole
  25. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta