The Action Mill One-Way LibraryThe Action Mill One-Way Library

The Action Mill Lending Library is a collection of materials we've found useful in our work. We purchase and distribute books to friends, colleagues and allies – you may have reached this page because you were given one of the books or DVDs from our Library. The Library has three simple rules:

  1. When you receive a book, don’t let it book sit on your shelf – read it now.
  2. Take everything you read with a grain of salt.
  3. No returns: pass it on to someone you think will find it useful.

Of course, you don't have to get these books from us – we've provided links so you can find them for yourself. Click on a book to learn more about it and to add your comments.

  •
    A Force More Powerful
    A Century of Non-Violent Conflict

    "In a contest of violence against violence," the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, "the superiority of the government has always been absolute." When confronted with nonviolent resistance on the part of the downtrodden, however, governments have often crumbled—witness the fall of South Africa's apartheid regime and the ousting of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia.

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  • Re:Imagining Change
    An Introduction to Story-based Strategy

    Our friends at Smartmeme use the power of narrative to advance a holistic vision of grassroots social change that connects struggles for democracy, peace, justice, and ecological sanity. During Turn Your Back on Bush, they taught us "Story Based Strategy" and helped us magnify the stories of hundreds of participants in the action. 

    Re:Imagining Change is their new strategy and training manual, available for download online or in hardcopy. It's filled with tools, analysis and case studies - check it out!

    Click here to order this book from SmartMeme.

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  • The Long Haul

    The autobiography of Myles Horton, organizer, and an originator of popular education. This book traces Horton's evolution as an organizer, from growing up in Tennessee, studying at Union Seminary, learning from Jane Addams at the Hull House settlement house, traveling to Denmark to learn about Danish Folk Schools, and back to Appalachia where he founded the Highlander School. Highlander became a center of labor and civil rights organizing, holding workshops and training a generation of organizers. 

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  • The Starfish and the Spider
    The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

    The title metaphor conveys the core concept: though a starfish and a spider have similar shapes, their internal structure is dramatically different—a decapitated spider inevitably dies, while a starfish can regenerate itself from a single amputated leg. In the same way, decentralized organizations, like the Internet, the Apache Indian tribe and Alcoholics Anonymous, are made up of many smaller units capable of operating, growing and multiplying independently of each other, making it very difficult for a rival force to control or defeat them.

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