Secondhand History, Politics & Ideas Bargain Book Box SP2933

Secondhand History, Politics & Ideas Bargain Book Box SP2933

A Pelican-era miscellany at its richest — the kind of shelf assembled when a bookshop's non-fiction section is at its most interesting. Cold War politics and Soviet dissent sit alongside the American civil rights movement, SAS memoirs, counterculture psychology, R.D. Laing's radical psychiatry, and Darrell Huff's witty dismantling of statistical spin. Twenty-one books that have not dated as badly as their original publishers feared.

1. Watergate: The Full Inside Story — Lewis Chester, Carl McClelland, Stephan Aris and William Shawcross — The definitive journalistic account of Nixon's fall, assembled from the testimonies of the principals and the reporting of the Sunday Times investigative team.
2. From Under the Rubble — Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others — Essays by Solzhenitsyn, Agursky, Shafarevich, and other Russian dissidents arguing for a moral and spiritual renewal of Soviet society from within — one of the key texts of the dissident movement.
3. Revolutionary Russia: A Symposium — ed. Richard Pipes — Twenty scholars including Schapiro, Ulam, Erickson, and Fainsod examine the origins and character of the Russian Revolution in what remains one of the most rigorous collections on the subject.
4. The LSD Story — John Cashman — Written in 1966 at the height of the controversy, this is a full account of LSD's chemistry, its history, and the revolution in consciousness it was claimed to have triggered — neither a warning nor a manifesto.
5. Why We Can't Wait — Martin Luther King Jr. — King's account of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, written the following year: the strategy, the marches, the jail, and the Letter from Birmingham Jail reproduced in full. Essential.
6. Industrial Man: Penguin Modern Sociology Readings — ed. Tom Burns — A landmark collection gathering the key texts on how modern industrial organisations shape the people who work within them.
7. William Morris: Selected Writings and Designs — ed. Asa Briggs — The essential Morris reader: essays on art, craft, and socialism alongside the wallpaper and textile designs that made him the defining figure of the Arts and Crafts movement.
8. Our Language — Simeon Potter — A Pelican introduction to the history and character of English — its origins, its oddities, and how it came to work the way it does. Vastly readable.
9. An Introduction to Contemporary History — Geoffrey Barraclough — Barraclough's influential argument that the twentieth century represents a decisive break with the European past, and that historians need new frameworks to understand it.
10. Sam Steele: Lion of the Frontier — Robert Stewart — The biography of Sir Samuel Steele — Mountie, soldier, empire-builder — one of the most forceful personalities produced by the Canadian frontier.
11. Silent Heroes: The Story of the SAS — Graeme Stewart — The history of the SAS from its formation in the Western Desert to its Cold War role, drawing on first-hand accounts from veterans of the regiment.
12. Fighter Pilot (BBC Television Series) — Colin Strong and Duff Hart-Davis — The tie-in to the BBC documentary series: extensive interviews with RAF veterans of the Second World War, covering campaigns from the Battle of Britain to the Pacific.
13. Memoirs of a British Agent — Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart — Lockhart was the British agent in Moscow during the Revolution, arrested for involvement in an alleged plot against Lenin. His memoir is one of the great first-hand accounts of the Bolshevik moment.
14. Interplanetary Flight — Arthur C. Clarke — Clarke's 1950 account of the mathematics and engineering of space travel, written before any rocket had reached orbit. Remarkable for how precisely it forecast what would come.
15. The Hoffa Wars — Dan E. Moldea — The full story of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa — his rise, his long alliance with organised crime, and his disappearance in 1975, which Moldea investigated more persistently than any other journalist.
16. Bitter Lemons — Lawrence Durrell — Durrell's account of his years in Cyprus in the early 1950s, as the island moved toward the crisis of EOKA and independence. Widely regarded as his finest prose work outside the Alexandria Quartet.
17. The Rebel Countess — Anne Marreco — The first major biography of Constance Markievicz — Irish revolutionary, first woman elected to the British Parliament, and one of the most contradictory figures of the independence movement.
18. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise — R.D. Laing — Laing's most radical argument: that madness may be a sane response to an insane world, and that psychiatry's categories tell us more about the society that created them than about the patients they label.
19. How to Lie with Statistics — Darrell Huff — The 1954 classic that every reader of graphs and news headlines should have encountered: a concise, funny demonstration of the ways numbers are used to mislead, distort, and persuade.
20. Einstein's Universe — Nigel Calder — Calder's accessible account of relativity and its consequences, written to accompany the BBC television series and requiring no mathematical background from the reader.
21. The End of Ideology — Daniel Bell — Bell's 1960 thesis that the great ideological conflicts of left and right had exhausted themselves — a book whose influence, and the objections it provoked, are still being worked out.