Review

These two books are moving and compelling explorations of the lives of Iraqi women. One is a work of fiction; the other an oral history. While the narrative forms allow an intimate and detailed view of individual lives, both books are suffused with an understanding of how the political situation of Iraq has always gone to the core of how life is experienced.

Haifa Zangana weaves together the stories of five women exiled in London during the late 1990s. Despite differences of politics…

Award-winning BBC business correspondent Paul Mason has set out on an important task in this, his first book: to keep alive the epic and inspirational stories of workers' struggles of days gone by and pass them on to the growing ranks of exploited working classes being created by the current expansion of global capitalism. Mason picks an international selection of key historical moments from the era of the first Industrial Revolution, and pairs them with examples of present day struggles in…

The fundamental premise of this surprisingly gripping book is that “individuals rather than governments or companies are going to be the driving force behind reductions in greenhouse gases.”

Annual UK CO2 emissions amount to 12.5 tonnes per person, roughly half of which is generated by individuals running their houses, cars and taking transport. The other half is generated by activities such as agriculture, industry, and transporting goods. By a closely examining the emissions…

What happens when the earth's climate warms by several degrees? Mark Lynas's latest book discusses changes predicted at various levels of global warming. By assigning each of the six chapters to degree of warming, Lynas illustrates the range of scenarios from one degree to six degrees. Some ideas presented will be familiar (rising ocean levels, crop failures, violent storms), but many more will come as a shock (more rainfall predicted for the Sahara desert, the Amazon rainforest easily…

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In Do It Yourself the Trapese Collective have succinctly compiled a practical snapshot of DIY culture: the idea that we can build meaningful social change ourselves, here and now.

At 300 pages the book does not set out to comprehensively cover all areas, but instead invites readers to feast on numerous practical suggestions and fill in the blanks with their “insurrectionary imaginations”. By its own admission, the book neglects important areas such as transport, housing, economics,…

This summer, long-time US peace campaigner/researcher Joe Gerson is visiting the UK for a speaker tour to launch his brilliant new book Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World.

Joe Gerson documents operational planning for the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean war, the Vietnam war (early French phase as well as the later US debacle), and later.
Empire and the Bomb records the use of US nuclear threats during…

“... time was not a single river but something always branching into every possible outcome; time was a tree growing at infinite speed to produce infinite branches, so that there were many pasts and more presents and this very moment is begetting many futures.”
Rebecca Solnit, writing about the Merced River, Yosemite, USA

Place: London, Tate Britain and Parliament Square; Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran... centres of power and then where power acts; centres of resistance... Time:…

It is a pity that books such as Blood Money have to be written. However, as long as such national hubris exists to prompt the current level of almost unimaginable mismanagement that is prevalent in Iraq today, then it as well that such misdeeds are put under the harshest, most thorough possible, public scrutiny. Any reader of this book should also be grateful that it is written by as competent and thorough an investigative journalist as Christian Miller, a Los Angeles Times staffer…

During my years of work in the international and local anti-apartheid movements and my pursuit of poetry that speaks to political reality, I discovered Brutus's poetry and heard of his activism. But I knew few details of his life and work. This book of memoirs, speeches, interviews and poetry is an excellent account of Dennis Brutus, and informed my admiration of his courage, commitment and perseverance.

Classified as “coloured” by the South African government, Brutus's…

I had two misgivings about this book before I began to read it. Both turned out to be unfounded.

The first was that, since I have read my fair share of nonviolence books, I feared that it would all be repetition. Cortright starts the book with Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but not with the ordinary biographical stories of their lives. Rather he uses them as vehicles to explain the secret of non-violence, together with today's scholars and his own opinions. It works very…

In These Strange Criminals, Peter Brock collects stories of imprisoned conscientious objectors since the First World War, and - with one exception - from the English speaking world; Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA. While at times repetitive - but that's the nature of prison life - the different stories manage to capture the experience of imprisoned COs, their thinking, and also the changes to prison over the course of 50 years.

Brock chose prison memoirs from a…

In October 2005, Maya Evans was arrested for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq during a remembrance ceremony at the Cenotaph on Whitehall. She was charged with taking part in an “unauthorised demonstration” in a “designated area” under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA) and on 7 December 2005 she became the first person to be convicted under this Act.

The case attracted huge attention in the mainstream media as well as being…

In Heat, George Monbiot attempts to construct what too few thinkers have attempted until now - a solution to climate change.

Refreshingly, he spends little time on the problem itself, declaring (correctly) that the debate on the science is over. Rather, the question is how we now deal with the greatest threat faced by humankind. Pointing out that current scientific estimates predict that the UK will need to cut its CO2 emissions by around 90% by 2030 - a far greater cut than…

With this manifesto, Gorbachev adds his voice to the growing roar of those calling for universal and lasting social justice, and does so in a manner that is both diplomatic and urgent. He describes with passion how poverty, environmental destruction and war are the inseparable consequences of endemic political failure, and laments the opportunity squandered by consecutive US governments to implement a new era of peace and disarmament following the end of the Cold War.

He finds…