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The journalist, author and filmmaker picks his five best books about the culture wars, which form the subject of his new eight-part series, Things FellApart, available now on BBC Sounds and Radio 4.

One of the pleasures of makingThings Fell Apartwere long walks listening out for buried treasure in audiobook memoirs. This extraordinary life story gave me episode one. A boy in an alpine evangelical commune, dreaming of making avant-garde movies, inadvertently kickstarts a campaign of murders in the 1990s.

Da Capo Press 11.95

In his exhaustive culture wars history, Hartman includes fascinating conflicts I couldnt fit in like Piss Christ, an artwork of a crucifix dipped in urine that caused wild ructions in the 1980s but is now largely forgotten, as many of the conflicts that overwhelm us today will surely soon be.

University of Chicago Press 17;The Week Bookshop 13.99

Walkers father was a Jewish lawyer; her mother was Alice Walker, author ofThe Color Purple. Her beautiful memoir tells how, after their split, her childhood was spent moving between universes that never overlap. The experience inspired her to invent a new movement third-wave feminism in the 1990s.

Out of print

Tammy Faye Bakker was an ostentatious 1980s televangelist. While undeniably fraud-adjacent her husband Jim was imprisoned for misusing viewer donations Tammy was a wonderful oasis of curiosity among her deeply homophobic peers.

Tarcher 10.99

Dick Gregory was a hugely successful comedian before he quit it all for civil rights activism in the 1960s. His memoir does not asterisk the n-word. Its spelt out. As a result, it was banned by Christian conservatives in the 1970s. And now it has been banned again this time by progressives on college campuses. Illiberalism mutates.

Plume 13.99

Read more from the original source:
Jon Ronson: my five best books about the culture wars - The Week UK