New Posts
  • Hi there guest! Welcome to PoliticalJack.com. Register for free to join our community?

Favorite political novels.

EatTheRich

President
A few of my favorites, in no particular order but limited to my favorite by a given author:

George Orwell, 1984. A critique of bureaucratic dictatorship that is both emotionally stirring and prescient.
Barry Unsworth, The Songs of the Kings. A retelling of the Iphigenia story that lays bare the base motivations behind war and religion.
Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead. The tale of an intelligently planned guerrilla struggle to restore the organic connection with each other and the Earth that the Laguna Pueblo author locates in the lives of her ancestors before capitalist values were introduced from Europe.
Jack London, The Iron Heel. A very prescient anticipation of the rise of fascism.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses. Humanizes Muslim immigrants (and by implication the despised of humanity) while giving faith a good drubbing. Maybe the reason Khomeini put a price on the author's head is because he came in for personal criticism?
Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues. Semi-autobiographical account of the author's life as a Jewish female-to-male-to-neither (?) trans working-class union activist and communist.
Robert Graves, Wife to Mr. Milton. Written from a conservative/feminist perspective, this critique of the Puritan ideal puts a human face on those left behind by revolution.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale. A feminist dystopian novel by an author who is a (progressive) conservative by the standards of her native Canada but a liberal by American standards. Also critical of religion and digital identities.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The Mayor of Casterbridge is my real favorite but this deals with bigger political themes--aristocratic and male privilege, poverty, and the environment in an age of rapid social and environmental change. Feminist and environmentalist before its time.
Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here. Fascism comes wrapped in an American flag.
Chimamanda Adichie, Purple Hibiscus. A down-to-earth tale of a crusading Christian Igbo pro-democracy journalist fighting Nigeria's hated Sani Abacha dictatorship who is also a brutal domestic abuser, and his daughter's search for independence, education, and love in that order.
Alexandre Dumas, Queen Margot. An exciting tale of political intrigue, upheavals, religious persecution, superstition, murder, love, sex, war, and much, much more.
Ayn Rand, We the Living. Kira, a proud and stubborn bourgeois student, and Andrei, an incorruptible GPU agent, find compassion for each other as the Russian revolution and the Stalinist counterrevolution (not how Rand would've put it), respectively, leaves them in insecure and sometimes desperate positions. Semi-autobiographical and by far Rand's most psychologically and politically realistic work.
Mildred Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Through the eyes of a child, the story of Black farmers struggling for land in the Jim Crow South reveals much that is different about the U.S. today and much that remains the same.
Lois Lowry, The Giver. Beneath the poisonous anticommunist coating is a life-affirming celebration of emotion.
Janusz Korczak, King Matt the First. Realistic and entertaining tale of a young boy who learns what it means to become king, his efforts to achieve constitutional and social reform as well as military valor, and the discovery that power is elusive even for absolute monarchs and that well-intentioned decisions can have unwelcome consequences. The author, a Jew, ran a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw and was murdered at Treblinka with the kids in his care after refusing the chance to escape but leave them behind to die.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. Epic story of poor white migrant farm workers.
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle. A working-class immigrant is put through the meat grinder.
 

EatTheRich

President
Atlas Shrugged
Great read. I disagree with much of Ayn Rand’s stated philosophy and indeed view her as a propagandist for political reaction. But she is a very good rhetorician and although she does not have complex characters she does make very well-organized and exciting morality plays promoting her philosophy. She is at least on the surface consistent and committed to a rationalist-modernist project, which I admire even while I dislike her aims. About some things—the primacy of existence, the value (though she does not put it this way and would strongly object to my doing so) of the dialectical approach, the individual as the proper moral and political value—she is spot on.

“This is John Galt speaking” (and the book itself) has been called tedious many times. My experience was not that. I found it at turns fascinating … I stood in awe of a master propagandist … infuriating … she was manifestly calling evil good and good evil, but the flaws in her logic were based on prejudices so ingrained as “common sense” or so dependent on the simplest equivocation they were often hard to spot … enlightening … as to the motives of power-lusters of all political stripes, the envy of vice toward virtue, and the few things Galt gets right about fundamental philosophy in that rant … and fraught with dramatic tension.

Dagny T. was a total Mary Sue like all her “sympathetic” characters. And real-life heiresses are pretty much never the only competent ones in a sea of mediocrity. But in her passion for justice, as she saw it, she is unsurpassed by few in literature (not, for example, by Galt).

I still prefer We the Living because the characters are more complex and the plot is more realistic. Also because the GPU agent and Communist Party member is depicted as a kind-hearted idealist with a blind spot … it seems Rand’s view of him is much like my view of her, plus the kindness.
 

EatTheRich

President
Hilary Mantel. A Place of Greater Safety. Follows the lives of Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre from preparatory school to the execution of Danton and Desmoulins.
 

EatTheRich

President
Peter Benchley. Q Clearance. A mid-level bureaucrat, given access to classified documents, and too careless to dispose of them properly according to regulation, finds himself enmeshed in a farcical web of espionage.
 
Top