Here’s the latest installment in our Open Books video series. In this one, New York Times columnist Gail Collins, author of When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present, explains the importance of Betty Friedan’s 1963 classic The Feminine Mystique.

In our “Open Books” series, Progressive Book Club talks to authors about the important books in their lives and work. Here’s our latest, featuring Max Blumenthal, who tells us about the works that influenced him during the writing of his book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. (Learn more about the Republican Gomorrah here.)

And don’t miss this PBC interview with Blumenthal where Blumenthal discusses Republican Gomorrah.

Here’s the first installment in our new video series, Open Books, in which we ask PBC authors to tell us about the books they love. This week, Rinku Sen, the co-author of The Accidental American, recommends two novels about characters trapped “between the oppressed and the oppressor,” and tells us why these books speak to her. (Related Title: The Known World by Edward P. Jones)

Greg Grandin is the author of Empire’s Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. He’s an associate professor of Latin American history at New York University.

What’s the greatest book in your field?

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (being re-released this year by Norton for its 50th anniversary [with a new afterword by Andrew J. Bacevich]).  It was published a month after the Cuban Revolution, and William’s analysis of what he dubbed “imperial anticolonialism” reads like a script for the US-produced horror movie that followed — in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and now the Middle East.  And, for an update published two decades later, there’s Williams’ great prose poem Empire as a Way of Life.

Rinku Sen is the President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and Publisher of ColorLines magazine. She is the author of  Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing, and, most recently, of The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization, available at Progressive Book Club.

Which books have most influenced you?

There are two; they’re both novels. One is The Known World by Edward P. Jones and the second one—you’ll note a similar theme—is The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji.  I happened to read these books in 2005, one right after the other, and they’re very interesting because they’re both about the middleman position in a society.  The Known World is about a community of freed slaves in 1860s Virginia who own slaves themselves but largely as a way of freeing their family members from slaveholders. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is about an Indian man growing up in Kenya just before the anti-colonialist revolutions in Kenya.  In both cases, the story is really about that person who is in between the oppressed and the oppressor, and that’s a position that I relate to very closely, being brown-skinned Indian immigrant from a professional family in the United States trying to figure out where my place is in the racial hierarchy of the U.S., and what my role is to be contributing towards everyone’s liberation.  So I highly recommend those two very moving books.

One of America’s most distinguished historians and critics, Garry Wills is the author of numerous books, including Saint Augustine, Papal Sin, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg. He has won many other awards, among them two National Book Critics Circle Awards and the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities. He is currently Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University.

Which books have most influenced you?

Augustine’s Confessions and Trinity, since they explore the human soul as God’s Image; in politics, the non-Communist attacks on capitalism in John Ruskin’s Unto This Last made their mark - as they did on Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw; Lord Acton’s Lectures on the French Revolution give a sense of what his great unwritten work on liberty would have been.

Robert Lipsyte has been an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Times and was the Emmy-winning host of the public affairs show The Eleventh Hour. He is the author of a number of acclaimed novels, including The Contender, The Brave, The Chief, Warrior Angel, and One Fat Summer.

Which books have most influenced you?

Reading John Steinbeck as a kid made me want to be a writer, especially Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat, The Moon is Down and The Grapes of Wrath. I have not gone back to them. Maybe I’m afraid they won’t hold up. In any case, they were there when I needed them.

Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, most recently The Life You Can Save.

Which books have most influenced you?

Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy was the first book of philosophy I ever read. Russell’s style of presenting philosophical issues made me want to keep reading and thinking about philosophical questions; Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics is simply the best book on ethics ever written; R.M. Hare’s Freedom and Reason was a challenging attempt to show that ethics could include both the elements mentioned in its title; and J.J.C. Smart’s little book An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics (subsequently reprinted as part of J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against) showed that utilitarianism was alive and well during my student days.