Books about Communes from Amazon.com

From Alistair Horne’s grand trilogy on French history—two magisterial works now back in print

In 1870, Paris was the center of Europe, the font of culture, fashion, and invention Ten months later Paris had been broken by a long Prussian siege, its starving citizens reduced to eating dogs, cats, and rats, and France had been forced to accept the humiliating surrender terms dictated by the Iron Chancellor Bismarck. To many, the fall of Paris seemed to be the fall of civilization itself. Alistair HorneÂ’s history of the Siege and its aftermath is a tour de force of military and social history, rendered with the sweep and color of a great novel..
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In the Pond is a slim little book about some very big issues: power, vanity, art, injustice, and politics Where Tom Wolfe would find the makings for a doorstop, however, debut novelist Ha Jin has created a rough-cut comic gem. Set in Communist China, the book takes as its hero a small, unprepossessing man named Shao Bin, a maintenance employee at the Harvest Fertilizer Plant and also a self-taught artist. Together with his wife and 2-year-old daughter, Bin inhabits a tiny 12-by-20-foot room. Bin is desperate to move into the newly built workers' compound, and he places his name on the waiting list with high hopes. But when the plant managers pass him over, despite the fact that he's been working there for years, Bin finally cracks. "In brief, the true scholar's brush must encourage good and warn against evil," he reads in The Essence of Ancient Chinese Thought, and inspired, he publishes a satirical cartoon protesting official corruption. The consequences of this simple act snowball, and in self-defense, Bin finds himself aiming his attacks ever higher up the bureaucratic ladder. This is a book that works on multiple levels: as character study, as political allegory, as sly bureaucratic satire, even, at times, as the broadest kind of slapstick. (One memorable scene involves Bin biting his superior on the butt.) Bin himself is half persecuted artist, half self-righteous boor; readers both sympathize with him and wonder along with one of his coworkers, "Why do you enjoy fighting so much?" Even his putative victory is left in doubt. As the book ends, Shao Bin has become perhaps a bigger fish, but there's no doubt about it; he's in the very same small pond where he started. --Mary Park.
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The utopian sixties inspired revolutionary and alternative ways to live, love, and entertain—and equally radical spaces to do it in. Stimulated by the psychedelic drug culture, rebel designers and architects distorted space to create womblike coves and isolation chambers, forging a spatial vocabulary that still reverberates today. At the same time, the tune-in-turn-on-drop-out message lured youths into far-flung communes, often under the roofs of brightly painted geodesic domes draped and tie-dyed fabric. Idealistic and anarchic enclaves with names like Drop City and Morning Star redefined the concept of community, inventing a wildly spontaneous way of building and dwelling. For the first time, these ephemeral spaces are brought together in Spaced Out. The many never-before-published photographs and an inventive text by acclaimed author Alastair Gordon show in detail the spirit and ideas of this radical period..
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A thrilling ride through the literature of Rimbaud in a France in the throes of revolution

"Verso's beautifully designed Radical Thinkers series, which brings together seminal works by leading left-wing intellectuals, is a sophisticated blend of theory and thought. The authors whose writings are included in the series have worked tirelessly to expose the mechanisms by which culture and knowledge are manufactured, managed and controlled."—Ziauddin Sardar, New Statesman.
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Where Have All the Hippies Gone? by Sam Yulish, is like no other book you've read lately. It has that old exuberance and wealth of emotion that make it, if nothing else, a chronicle of wondering and journeying, of knowing and finding out. Each interview builds on the next the way the tie-dyed few built upon each other's singular experience until the handful were a nation. This book, rough and generous, is true to the sleeping spirit of the freak. In the words of the Jefferson Airplane: Feed Your Head. -Roy Bentley, published poet and author Where Have All the Hippies Gone? is by far the most enjoyable book about the hippies and their sixties adventures I have ever read. What fun! And great period drawings. The music trivia quiz is a real challenge. -Patricia Dennison, author and pharmacist In his unique work "Where Have All the Hippies Gone?" retired math professor and published writer and poet Sam Yulish attempts to show how the hippies have changed since the late sixties and early seventies. In his fictional characters he has created memorable portraits of people who lived through it. Throughout "Where Have All the Hippies Gone?" is a nostalgia for a past era that lasted for only 5 or 6 years. Despite its brevity, the era had a great effect on each character's life and is still prominent in day-to-day thinking. But far from being just a nostalgia look back at the sixties, "Where Have All the Hippies Gone?" is a unique book that deals with ideas. Most of the book is devoted to interviews with past and present hippies. This is a brilliant format which gives access to the opinions and the attitudes of the characters. "Where Have All the Hippies Gone?" is a fascinating, unique book. It is a page-turner that can be read in a couple of hours. It is fun, historical, and mind-bending. -David Bruce, Athens News.
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The "ETH Studio Basel Institute for the Contemporary City" has been studying Switzerland with its mesh of complex issues for a number of years. Now, the diverse interactions and permutations of its geography, history, language, culture, society, economics, transport, urban life and architecture have been collated and analyzed, revealing the genesis, together with the constant and variable factors which have influenced the country s development. Potentially controversial and /or desirable designs have been put forward for the future of the important metropolitan areas and the Alpine regions. The work is divided into three volumes with a double map of Switzerland..
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One of the powers of art is its ability to convey the human aspects of political events. In this fascinating survey on art, artists, and anarchism, Allan Antliff interrogates critical moments when anarchist artists have confronted pivotal events over the past 140 years. The survey begins with Gustave Courbet's activism during the 1871 Paris Commune (which established the French republic) and ends with anarchist art during the fall of the Soviet empire. Other subjects include the French neoimpressionists, the Dada movement in New York, anarchist art during the Russian Revolution, political art of the 1960s, and gay art and politics post-World War II. Throughout, Antliff vividly explores art's potential as a vehicle for social change and how it can also shape the course of political events, both historic and present-day; it is a book for the politically engaged and art aficionados alike.

Allan Antliff is the author of Anarchist Modernism.

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This is a unique and honest account of the author's childhood growing up in a commune in rural Virginia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nethers, as the commune came to be called, was started by Eugster's "liberal, radical, union organizing mother," Carla. Committed to radical social change and caught up in the fervor of counterculture, Carla, separated from the father of her three children, unilaterally sold their middle-class house in Baltimore, and moved to a rural area. They moved in 1969, when Eugster was 9 years old.

The culture shock was difficult for Eugster's two older sisters, but for the 9-year-old Eugster it was especially confusing and frightening. She recounts the difficult transition from a traditional family life to one in a communal setting. Eventually, Carla was able to buy a large farmhouse with acres of land around it, and this became the commune. An array of colorful characters drifted into the commune, and Eugster writes sensitively about being a child in the midst of all this. She accurately depicts communal living in all its complexity, describing weekly consensus meetings, days of silence, and quarterly sweat-hut rituals. This is essentially the dramatic story of a young girl given complete freedom in a communal setting, which at many times felt to her like abandonment.

Notes from Nethers is a riveting look at a time and place long gone. It is an important piece of American cultural history, and the history of efforts to create a utopian society, underscoring the fact that no matter how ideally a societal structure is conceived, its enactment cannot escape the imperfections of humans who embody it..
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We know much about the Italian city states--the "communes"--of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But historians have focused on their political accomplishments to the exclusion of their religious life, going so far as to call them "purely secular contrivances." When religion is considered, the subjects are usually saints, heretics, theologians, and religious leaders, thereby ignoring the vast majority of those who lived in the communes. In Cities of God, Augustine Thompson gives a voice to the forgotten majority--orthodox lay people and those who ministered to them.

Thompson positions the Italian republics in sacred space and time. He maps their religious geography as it was expressed through political and voluntary associations, ecclesiastical and civil structures, common ritual life, lay saints, and miracle-working shrines. He takes the reader through the rituals and celebrations of the communal year, the people's corporate and private experience of God, and the "liturgy" of death and remembrance. In the process he challenges a host of stereotypes about "orthodox" medieval religion, the Italian city-states, and the role of new religious movements in the world of Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante.

Cities of God is bold, revisionist history in the tradition of Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars. Drawing on a wide repertoire of ecclesiastical and secular sources, from city statutes and chronicles to saints' lives and architecture, Thompson recaptures the religious origins and texture of the Italian republics and allows their inhabitants a spiritual voice that we have never heard before..
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