Two Books From the Piles and Piles of Books that have Collected Here on and Around the Dining Room Futon

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We all know that the best kind of book to own is a refrence book. This is a very excellent reference book: Bill Risebero's Modern Architecture and Design: An Alternative History. The edition I have is a First MIT Press Edition published in 1983. The inside flap of the dust jacket has a quote from Sir James Richards which reads, "A really brave attempt to put into historical perspective the present confused and conflicting opinions about modern architecture and design." The book is divided into eight sections (1. The modern Prometheus: The industrial revolution; 2. Contrasts: Britian and America in the late 19th Century; 3. The philosophy of right: Continental Europe in the early 19th century; 4. How we live and how we might live; Europe in the mid-19th century; 5. The will to power: Europe and America in the late 19th century; 6. The light that failed: The turn of the century; 7. The state and revolution: The First World War and after; 8. Brave new world: The Second World War and after). The best thing about this book: the numerous b&w illustrations. What may make the history seem confused and conflicted is the effort to present an alternative history that is still Eurocentric.

Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove's voices of a peoples's history OF THE UNITED STATES is another great reference book picked up at a free event at Cooper Union a few years ago. Published in 2004 by Seven Stories Press, Voices consists of hundreds of historic essays, letters and speaches organized into 24 groupings: 1) Columbus and Las Casas 2) The First Slaves 3) Servitude and rebellion 4) Preparing the Revolution 5) Half a Revolution 6) The Early Women's Movement 7) Indian Removal 8) The War in Mexico 9) Slavery and Defiance 10) Civil War and Class Conflict 11) Strikers and Populists in the Guilded Age 12) The Expansion of the Empire 13) Socialists and Wobblies 14) Protesting the First World War 15) From the Jazz Age to the Uprisings of the 1930's 16) WWII and McCarthyism 17) The Black Upsurge Against Racial Segregation 18) Vietnam and Beyond: The Historic Resist 19) Women, Gays and Other Voices of Resistance 20) Losing Control in the 70's 21)The Carter-Reagan-Bush Consensus 22)Panama, The 1991 Gulf War and the War at Home 23) Challenging Bill Clinton 24)Bush II and the "War on Terror"