Review

Review

A list of reviews up to 2012

15 December 2011Review

Allen Lane, 2011; 608pp; £30

Malcolm X came to public notice as a black supremacist, the public voice of the right-wing separatist African-American cult, “the Nation of Islam”, known for his brilliant and vitriolic anti-white rhetoric. He was, in the early 1960s, the most prominent African-American critic of nonviolence – though he himself never engaged in violent action against white racism. By the time of his assassination in February 1965, Malcolm X had broken with the Nation of Islam, discarded black separatism,…

1 November 2011Review

Gabriel Carlyle surveys some of the books he read during the programming of October’s Rebellious Media Conference (RMC)

Andre Schiffrin, Words and Money (Verso, 2010; 128pp; £12.99).
Dan Hind, The Return of the Public (Verso, 2010; 256pp; £14.99).
Becky Hogge, Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia (Bookkake, 2011; 246pp; £8.99, or available for free download from barefootintocyberspace.com/book).

Imagine a world without small publishers or independent bookshops – perhaps without bookshops at all – where the only cinemas are multiplexes showing films like…

1 October 2011Review

Herbert Adler Publishing, 2011; 224pp; £9.95

This book consists of fifteen articles compiled some years ago from interviews with former pupils of AS Neill’s radical educational establishment, Summerhill. The interviewees have between them a huge range of careers, made wider than it might have been by the fact that many individuals changed direction several times. Leonard Lasalle, for instance, gave up working in advertising because it seemed to him to be immoral and ended up as a dealer in antiques.

The contributors are honest…

1 October 2011Review

2011, 90 mins plus extras. Produced in collaboration with Roehampton University, London, and New Statesman. Available for £6 via www.chronicleofprotest-thefilm.co.uk  

Filmed between December 2010 and March 2011, Michael Chanan’s documentary is a collage of video and music capturing the excitement, spontaneity and power of the grassroots movement that exploded into existence as a response to government spending cuts in the universities and beyond.

As well as the video diary elements filmed by Chanan himself, there is interspersed found and borrowed footage, reminding us of how this was a movement interacting with the public sphere, and drawing in…

1 September 2011Review

Ebury Press, 2011; 327pp; £11.99)

 

 

 

 

1 September 2011Review

9/11 (Seven Stories Press 2011, rev. ed. 176pp, £8.99); Power and Terror: Conflict, Hegemony and the Rule of Force (Pluto 2011, rev. ed., 224pp, £12.99); New World of Indigenous Resistance: Noam Chomsky and voices from North, South and Central America (City Lights Books 2010, 416pp, £17.99)  

Asked days after the 11 September 2001 attacks if US president George W Bush’s “war on terror” was winnable, Noam Chomsky responded: “If we want to consider this question seriously, we should recognise that in much of the world the US is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and with good reason. We might bear in mind, for example, that in 1986 the US was condemned by the World Court for ‘unlawful use of force’ (international terrorism) and then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling…

13 August 2011Review

Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The Real Cost of the Iraq Conflict (Allen Lane, 2008; ISBN 978-1846141287; 336pp; £20); Geoff Simons, Iraq Endgame? Surge, suffering and the politics of denial (Politicos Publishing, 2008; ISBN 978-1-84275-221-0; pp464; £14.99); Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse: Undercover Dispatches from a Dying Regime (Penguin Books, 2007; ISBN 978-0-141-01827-0; pp432; £8.99)

The Three Trillion Dollar War is exhaustive analysis of the true cost of the war in Iraq. The headline figure – $3 trillion – is an unthinkable amount of money. Half of it, for example, would cover the cost of the United Nation’s eight Millennium Development Goals – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education by 2015.

But, Stiglitz and Bilmes point out, $3 trillion is a conservative estimate of the cost of the…

1 July 2011Review

OR Books, 2011; 336pp; £11 from www.orbooks.-com

The trouble with short story anthologies is that you can never quite tell what you’re going to get. Unless you are familiar with all the writers in the collection, you just have to dive in and hope for the best. Welcome to the Greenhouse is a typical anthology in this regard. Since I’m not a sci-fi fan I’d never heard of any of the authors, and so I dipped in not knowing what to expect.

What I got was a mixed bag. Some fine stories, some dull, some too badly written to finish. The…

1 July 2011Review

Pluto, 2011; 248pp; £17.99

“Peace without justice is hollow, a sham, the deathly stillness of tyranny triumphant,” writes Michael Riordon, as he shares his stories of Israelis and Palestinians resisting the occupation, all of whom have experienced harassment from the authorities, sometimes death threats and imprisonment.

The Israelis, immigrants or children of immigrants, all initially supported a Zionist state as a home for Jews, but gradually came to see Israel as a colonialist oppressor. Riordon, a Canadian…

1 June 2011Review

Haymarket Books, 2011; 305pp, £11.99

“Our South Africa moment has finally arrived,” is Omar Barghouti’s rallying call for a global BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement to support the struggle for human rights in Palestine. In this book he eloquently and persuasively sets out the arguments for BDS against Israel in order to end its oppression of the Palestinians that is in defiance of both UN resolutions and international law.

Academic and co-founder of BDS, Barghouti draws on the South African anti-apartheid…

1 June 2011Review

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1 June 2011Review

Housmans Bookshop, 2011; 94pp; £5.95 + p&p from Housmans, 0207 837 4473 or www.housmans.com

Originally published (for Burmese dissidents) in 1993, From Dictatorship to Democracy has since been translated into at least 28 other languages, and has now been reprinted in English by Housmans Peace Bookshop.

Sharp’s analysis – and this short book in particular – has reportedly played a significant inspirational role in a whole series of nonviolent uprisings, from Serbia to Egypt. Nonetheless, his leaden prose, the extremely general nature of much of the analysis and the lack of…

1 June 2011Review

Meat: A benign extravagance (Permanent Publications, 2010; 322pp; £19.95); The Vegetarian Myth: Food, justice and sustainability (Flashpoint Books, 2009, 312pp, pbk, £14.99); Vegan Freak: Being vegan in a non-vegan world (PM Press, 2010; 222pp; £10.99).

These books offer three very different perspectives on the exploitation of animals for food by humans: one from a land activist (Fairlie), one from an angry ex-vegan (Keith), and one written by passionate animal rights advocates (Torres and Torres).

Putting my cards as reviewer on the table, I’m philosophically an omnivore though practically a near-vegetarian; my agricultural experience is limited to growing up in Somerset and tending an under-producing allotment for 10 years; and…

1 May 2011Review

OR Books, 2011; 234pp; available for £8 + p&p only from www.orbooks.com

Can a book of “tweets” (140-character-or-less micro-messages) really be readable? The answer is a resounding yes (and don’t worry if you’re not Twitter-savvy, I certainly wasn’t).

Through careful selection the editors have created an inspiring and coherent narrative that not only explains the evolving strategies of both sides but also allows personalities to shine through. Nonviolence played a crucial role throughout, especially in the early decisive confrontations with the police (“…

1 May 2011Review

Cambridgeshire Records Society, 2010; 406pp; £18

“I like… Peace News, the best of the weeklies”. So wrote Jack Overhill in his diary of daily life and activities as a shoe repairer and pacifist conscientious objector (CO) in Cambridge during the Second World War.

Born into a family of bootmakers, and ordered by his father to leave school at 14, Jack devoted all his spare time to self-education and attempts at novel-writing, as well as keeping a diary for most of his adult life. The 25 typescript volumes were deposited in the…