Fiction and Memoirs Illustrating Political Perspectives

first posted 25 October 2010; last revised 3 January 2011

Fiction and Memoirs Illustrating Contemporary Political Perspectives

by Mark Satin

[author, Radical Middle, Basic Books, 2004]

This page is meant to supplement our ideology page, 50 Contemporary Political Ideologies. (On that page, three brief representative readings about each of 50 contemporary ideologies are listed & linked under the 16 political perspectives below.)

Our ideology page is all about analysis and strategy. This page is different. It is all about experience and feeling-tone. If our ideology page is meant to convey what can be linearly said about contemporary political perspectives, then this page is meant to convey deeper truths about them ... and about those who share them.

I established a few criteria in choosing these texts, which I adhered to strictly, possibly too strictly:

each novel must have been published since 1945; each memoir, since 1990;
each text must have been written originally in English;
each must be at least marginally sympathetic to the political perspective at issue; and
each must remain relevant to present circumstances.

All links are to the publications’ Amazon.com pages. And yeah, I’ve actually read all these books (over the course of a lifetime as an activist and political writer), so I know you will enjoy and / or benefit from them.

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I. ANARCHISM

Novel: Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974

Memoir: Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 2004

II. CAPITALISM

Novel: Philip Roth, American Pastoral, 1997

Memoir: Sam Walton with John Huey, Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story, 1992

III. CONSERVATISM

Novel: Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 1970

Memoir: Mary Eberstadt, ed., Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys, 2007

IV. DECENTRALISM

Novel: Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia, 1975

Memoir: Bill Kauffman, Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive, 2002

V. ECOLOGISM

Novel: Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang, 1975

Memoir: Derrick Jensen, A Language Older than Words, 2000

VI. (NEO)FASCISM / RACIALISM / CONSPIRACISM

Novella: Derrick Bell, “The Space Traders,” in Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, 1992, or freely downloadable HERE

Quasi-memoir: Carol Swain & Russ Nieli, eds., Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America, 2003 [skip the hostile introduction and go straight to the interviews]

VII. FEMINISM

Novel & Play: Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, 1962; or Wendy Wasserstein, “The Heidi Chronicles,” in Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, 1990

Memoir: Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, 1999

VIII. GLOBALISM

Novel: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections, 2001

Memoir: Robert Rubin, In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington, 2003 [market globalism]; Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists; or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath, 2003 [cosmopolitan globalism]; and Marisa Handler, Loyal to the Sky: Notes from an Activist, 2007 [justice globalism]

IX. LIBERALISM

Novel: J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, 1999 [discussed by us HERE]

Memoir: Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran, 2003

X. LIBERTARIANISM

Novel: Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

Quasi-memoir: Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, 2007

XI. MULTICULTURALISM

Novel: Zadie Smith, On Beauty, 2005 [reviewed by us HERE]