Review

The British literary scene is pretty infatuated with English language writing by Indians and the Asian diaspora. Figures such as Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie are established icons, and newer names like Monica Ali have massive sales. Black British writers of Afro-Caribbean descent are also widely known, despite the discrimination they still face in getting published.

With one or two prominent exceptions, such as Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka, African writers are much less widely…

This multifunction CD from the Peace Pledge Union uses a browser based system for navigating through the material.

Contents are divided into nine sections, including: quotations; racialism; war and peace; civil disobedience; the movement & black power; violence & nonviolence.

The disc also includes sources and a comment on the famous “I have a dream” speech and lists books by and about King. It also offers speeches - in print and with some video and audio extracts -…

This volume sets out to demonstrate that we are now living in what the editors refer to as a “new age of Empire”, which the book argues began with wars of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of being the start of a world in which global co-operation ensures advancement and prosperity for all people, globalisation is actually responsible for the increased instability that threatens ever-greater numbers of people.

A collection of original and rigorous pieces by nine prominent…

Our wondrous Western Civilisation, with its self-image of progress, rationality and human rights has, over the last hundred years, become a brutal glutton for oil. This much should be obvious to everyone. What isn't so obvious - but is made so in this short and punchy booklet produced by three campaigning groups - is the price paid by western workers, citizens of Majority World countries and the biosphere itself.

It moves swiftly (two pages per topic) through oil and conflict,…

In one of many memorable scenes in his new book, Christian Parenti asks a doctor in Ramadi, Iraq, whether he sees many children with symptoms related to possible radiation poisoning – a potential legacy of depleted-uranium weapons used by US forces in 1991 and 2004. “I cannot answer,” the doctor replies. “Why not?” Parenti asks. After a long pause the doctor finally offers a coded apology: “This is the freedom,” he explains. “Ah, the freedom … [w]e have the gas-line freedom, the looting…

The fate of those brave men who deserted the German army during the Nazi dictatorship, and what became of them after WW2, is something which few people know much about. That these circa 20,000 deserters were either shot, or placed in labour battalions was bad enough. Yet having been branded with a “criminal record” for their war resistance, they suffered more fiscal, social, and employment discrimination once they were back within civilian society. As former “criminals” they were restricted…

Imagine Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Nike as real people. This is how The Corporation – the latest political documentary to hit our cinema screens – begins. In taking a look at the psychological profile of a modern day corporation – its self-interested nature, its inability to feel guilt and its uncaring stance – the film reveals that our favourite brands fit precisely the medical definition of a psychopath. Unfortunately, as the documentary explains, under today’s laws, a corporation…

Using a single entity or idea to tell a wider story has been a saleable strategy for popular historians since Longitude became such a resounding hit. People expecting something similar in Joe Sherman’s Gasp: the Swift and Terrible Beauty of the Air may well start out by being a little disappointed. Sherman is an excellent writer, and the book’s first half carries an impressive array of facts and anecdotes. However, their assembly is as formless as their subject. In this exploration of our…

Few novels are reviewed in Peace News, but then few novelists have the anti-war commitment of Maggie Helwig, a PN contributor, Woman in Black and former member of the WRI Council. This novel, however, is not an anti-war tract but an enthralling work of imagination that gains much of its power from Maggie's serious and multi-angled approach to the reality of war.

The story is set at the false turn of the millennium (remember the panic about y2k chaos?) when the…

I am a big APC and TooL fan, so when I heard the chaps were going to knock out a covers album I was a bit hesitant.

What if a band you really like starts churning out cheesy covers in a weird, referential, “we're all rock gods together” kind of way?

Well, no worries on that front: this album surpassed my expectations, both musically and politically, and has been played non-stop at the PN office for the past couple of weeks.

Running up to the US election APC announced…

Donald Rooum's Wildcat cartoons have been published in Freedom Anarchist Fortnightly for longer than some Peace News readers have been tramping their ecological footprints over the planet. There are series of books available with titles such as the ABC of Bosses, Health Service Wildcat and Wildcat Strikes Again.

Rooum's work has many strengths - the clarity of the line drawings, the self-conscious and self-mocking use of stereotypes (the…

This useful summary and overview is part of a series of beginner's guides published by Oneworld. I'd like to see the others also - on Genetics, PalestineIsrael and particularly Postmodernism, a subject on which I shall always be a beginner.

Tormey presents a well-organised schematic look at the modern anti-capitalist movement in recent years. He believes that the last five years since WTO Seattle in 1999 calls for a redefinition of anti-capitalist movements - essentially the hopeful…

It was a pleasure to be given this to review - it's a book I'd want to buy if I could afford it.

Rex Weyler has written a history of a major part of this movement, assessing many of the personalities, and narrating some of the dramatic stories. (See interview p10-12.)

Lots of this has been told before, but this might be the first attempt to pull so much of this history together by someone so close to it. It is a pity it concentrates on the 1970s, though that means it gives a…

Otto Grunfeld was a teenager when he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration for the crime of being a Jew. He spent two years living in a Jewish ghetto in Czechoslovakia before being transported to Auschwitz and later to Kaufering. During that time all other members of his immediate family were killed.

It took him fifty years to find the strength and the distance to be able to write about his war experience and the result is a slip of a book - just 100 pages. The weight of…

This book, published in association with Médecins sans Frontiéres, lacks a precise focus, but is principally concerned with international responses to intranational conflict and the problems they pose to humanitarian organisations.

It begins with an excellent and incisive introduction by Jean-Hervé Bradol who outlines three basic types of international response: intervention, involvement and abstention. A large part of the book is dedicated to case…