The Classic Slum by Robert Roberts

This is part memoir, part sociology. Roberts grew up in the slum of Salford outside Manchester during early 1900’s. The title comes from Engels who had interests in factories in Manchester and would regularly commute through Salford, and who felt it was a prototypical English slum. It’s a sharply observed but unsentimental account of a largely vanished world and its decline. Interesting in itself, it’s also excellent supplemental reading if you’re reading Marx and Engels.

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño is best known for 2666 (BANGER) and The Savage Detectives (BANGER) but this is another masterpiece. A series of short biographies of fictional fascist writers, this book is one of the best examinations of fascism out there. It’s all the better because it’s oblique, merely setting out the facts of the writers’ lives, times and milieu and in the process getting at something essential about what kind of people are attracted to fascism and in turn the intellectual poverty of fascism as an ideology