I recently submitted this list of recommended books to the BackStory Cafe opening soon at the Experimental Station here in Chicago. They are collecting book lists from local artists and activists to have on hand at their infoshop.
3 top5 Books from Daniel Tucker 10-26-07
[Culture]
Stephen Duncombe’s “DREAM: progressive politics in an age of fantasy”
ed. Brian Wallis, “Democracy: a Project by Group Material”
Paul Berman, “Power and the Idealists”
George Katsiaficas, “The Imagination of the New Left” and “The Subversion of Politics”
Brian Holmes, “Unleashing the Collective Phantoms” and “Hieroglyphs of the Future”
for other good texts on geopolitics/art/activism (http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/)
[Politics and Economy]
David Harvey, “A Brief History of Neoliberalism”
Howard Zinn, “A Peoples History of the US”
Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism”
Hannah Arendt, “On Revolution”
Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Origin of Capitalism; a longer view”
[Geography and Urbanism]
John Forester, “Planning in the Face of Power”
Mike Davis, “City of Quartz”
Neil Smith, “The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City”
Kevin Lynch, “The Image of the City”
Harold M Mayer and Richard C. Wade, “Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis”
Daniel Tucker 