Review

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia and embarked on a four-year reign of terror and genocide. During this period, over 14,000 so-called “traitors” were processed through the secret prison S-21 set in a former school, with confessions extracted under torture. As part of the process, captives were photographed prior to execution.

S-27 is a play inspired by these real events. May’s job is to take the photographs. We follow her as she begins to question what she is doing,…

I liked the Transition books the moment I saw them – they are well-designed and produced, and look and feel great. In a way they mirror the Transition movement itself, rolling together a mass of related ideas into an attractive package that promises a way out of the looming dead end that is peak oil and climate change. So they look good and offer much, but do the books deliver? And can the Transition movement itself deliver on its promises?

The Handbook is split into three sections –…

Written by three British-based scholars – a political scientist, a human geographer and a sociologist – Anti-War Activism is the first book-length academic analysis of the post 9/11 anti-war movement in the UK.

Focusing on six organisations – Stop the War Coalition, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Faslane 365, Muslim networks, the Quakers and Justice Not Vengeance – the study is based on 60 interviews with activists, including Peace News editor Milan Rai and columnist Maya Evans.…

This is a book about the way refugee academics have been either rescued by their British counterparts or received and treated on seeking asylum in the UK. In particular it focuses on the work of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) – originally formed in 1933 as the Academic Assistance Council.

The book is divided into three parts: “Then”, about the rescue of expelled or threatened (mainly Jewish) academics from Nazi Germany and neighbouring countries; “Until”, a short…

Once you get past the introduction – which is poorly written and unfocused, with most of the important information repeated in the main body of the book – Long Time Passing is just what it says on the cover: a country by country breakdown of the effects of war and terror on mothers, families and society.

Each chapter – covering Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria and the US – starts with a well-referenced history of recent events that have briefly appeared in the…

In a society where only 3% of babies are exclusively breastfed at five months (Unicef 2005), breastfeeding can seem like a political act. Certainly where I live, it’s so unusual to see a woman breastfeeding that I can’t help doing a double-take when I see it.

Kate Evans – better known for her excellent cartoon books on the anti-roads movement, climate change and civil liberties – has produced a funny, subversive, supremely helpful and reassuring book for those who want to breastfeed…

In the foreword to Low Impact Development, long-time promoter Simon Fairlie favours a definition of the eponymous concept as “development which, by virtue of its low or benign environmental impact, may be allowed in locations where conventional development is not permitted.”

The book sets out by putting low impact development (LID) into context, stressing the urgent need for such environmentally-friendly housing to be considered as a mainstream approach: “LID has huge potential to…

In popular myth, the Second World War has been cast as the last just war. Since Hitler was an evil tyrant who murdered millions of Jewish people, Britain and America had no option but to fight him. Churchill and Roosevelt were towering heroes, who did everything they could to minimise the effects of war on civilians, in order to rescue Europe from oppression.

Human Smoke is a welcome debunking of this legend. In it, Nicholson Baker has put together an impressive account of the origins…

This book is about a campaign against an arms fair in Australia that included a two-week-long attempt – with a large measure of success – to blockade all three entrances to the site – not only during the arms fair but the week before, when exhibitors were arriving to set up. I would recommend it to anyone concerned about the problems of large demonstrations and meetings involving individuals and groups with a range of attitudes to nonviolence.

There are day-by-day accounts of what…

Set at the time of the first atomic bomb test in 1945 and the days leading up to it, this opera looks at these events through the focal characters of J Robert Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, fellow physicist Edward Teller, and general Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project. The libretto created by Peter Sellars is based on original source material including interviews, memoirs and declassified documents, as well as other works such as the Bhagavad Gita and the poetry of…

Though some of us may not fully appreciate it, media and communication systems (and the policies and subsidies that helped create them) should be a central concern for all activists. For example, without docile and generally compliant media it is difficult to see how the British government could have taken part in the disastrous and illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq – or survived the aftermath of having done so – or how it could continue to drive us at full pelt towards the cliff-edge of…

It is now over seven years since US and British forces invaded Afghanistan. For much of this time there has been little news about the country, with the attention of the US and anti-war activists focused on Iraq. This is now changing however, and Obama has followed up his campaign pledges by committing an extra 17,000 US troops to Afghanistan. Britain enthusiastically supported this move, and is likely to increase the 9,000 UK troops already there.

In this context then, increasing our…

On 18 January 2009, as Israeli bombs – many of them containing British-made components – rained down on the people of Gaza, six people entered the EDO arms factory in Brighton, and proceeded to carry out a people’s decommissioning. Equipment used to make weapons’ components was smashed, and computers and filing cabinets were thrown out of windows. EDO claimed they had suffered £300,000 of damage – no mention, of course, of the damage being caused by their weapons in Gaza. All six were…

This isn’t a book about humanitarian relief, or really about the aid delivered by aid agencies at all. Instead its about the much bigger sums which rich countries’s governments contribute to African infrastructure, governance and welfare systems on a regular basis.

Most African countries receive more than 10% of their GDP in aid, and a few, like Sierra Leone and Burundi, receive more than 30 per cent. Aid received on this scale has an enormous impact, but not necessarily a good one,…

Combining American historian Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States and his autobiography You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train, A People’s History of American Empire is an inspirational “history from below” in comic form.

Starting with 9/11, the book takes the form of an extended lecture from Zinn, focusing on lesser-known episodes from American history, including the invasion of the Philippines in 1898 (where an early form of waterboarding was used during…