The writing itself is not as important as the ideas presented. With that in mind I place the first three titles on The Shelf
Out of This Furnace is an historical novel and the best-known work of the American writer Thomas Bell (1903–1961).
The novel is set in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a steel town just south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania along the Monongahela River. It was first published in 1941 by Little, Brown and Company. Based upon Bell’s own family of Rusyn and Slovak immigrants, the story follows four generations of a family, starting with their migration in 1880 from Austria-Hungary to the United States, and finishing with World War II. The novel’s title refers to the central role of the steel mill in the family’s life and in the history of the Pittsburgh region.
Long out of print, the novel was rediscovered in the 1970s by David P. Demarest, Jr., a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, who convinced director Frederick A. Hetzel at the University of Pittsburgh Press to reissue it in 1976. The book quickly became a regional bestseller. By the 1980s, however, it found an even larger readership on American college campuses. Out of This Furnace is regularly used as required reading in universities to introduce students to the history of immigration, industrialisation, and the rise of trade unionism, as well as to the genre of the American working class novel.
Everyone is looking for Chano Salgado… High-flying corporate PR executive Evan Hatch is dying. Dying not of a rich man’s disease, but of chagas, a beetle-born disease endemic to Latin America. Desperate for a cure, Evan travels to Mexico in search of the bone-marrow tissue-match that only the brother he has never met can provide.
Reclusive young widower and political apostate, Chano Salgado’s work sterilizing bottles in a tiny, smoky shack comes to an end when he is persuaded to blow up the pipelines of Ethylclad, a toxic-waste plant sucking the local groundwater dry.
Police and soldiers across Tamaulipas, Mexico’s northeasternmost state, are hunting Chano Salgado the terrorist saboteur; while teenager Daniel Salgado, boards a Costa Rican fishing-smack knowing only the name of the Mexican village where he was born.
An epic novel about loss and hope, identity and belief, the story takes us, via container-crate and conference-suite, assassination and passport-theft, from refugee detention centre and Rio Bravo to the Seattle WTO protests. And here on the streets of Seattle, amid tear gas and rubber bullets, the destinies of Chano, Evan and Daniel are changed forever.
The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen
n an America stretched by crisis to the breaking point, billionaire entrepreneur and government insider James Sands is riding high. Over the protests of civic groups and the increasing alienation of his wife, Anne, Sands is poised on the brink of an immensely risky and controversial deal that will give him control of all public water in the Pacific Northwest. But when his business partner is murdered by a radical group called The Army of the Republic, Sands finds himself losing control of his business and his life. Desperate, he turns to Whitehall Security, a private intelligence firm with far-reaching political connections. For a steep monthly fee, Whitehall will hunt down and eliminate any threats to Sands’s enterprise.
