Review

This offering from Peace Direct uses personal narratives to celebrate and give voice to a very different type of hero: individuals who have taken the frequently traumatic decision to reject the path of conflict in favour of the often more difficult but ultimately far more fulfilling route of active peace-making.

The subjects of these fifteen accounts would not characterise themselves as heroes, and it is this humility that gives the book much of its force. The stories are told with…

If ever there was a time for peace, it must surely be our troubled, traumatised own. And yet, if it were instigated, the fundamental question remains: who might benefit from this dreamt-of peace, and would any agreement resolve the underlying causes of conflict or merely satisfy the current global managers of economic and political power?

Given that this review is being written the day after 125 Iraqis were killed by US strikes in the Iraqi city of Samarra, while dozens died in…

Most PN readers would, I hope, be at least aware of the issue of the “missing women” of India and China and the growing problem of gender imbalance in the populations of these two huge countries. The increasing use of sex-selective abortion as an apparently more socially acceptable option than female infanticide is the latest twist to this tale, the chilling use of modern medical technologies to eliminate socially and economically undesirable girl children.

As a woman and a feminist…

Between 1961 and 1971 the United States dropped approximately 46 million litres of Agent Orange - a herbicide containing the highly toxic waste product dioxin - on South Vietnam. Some 20,000 villages were sprayed, affecting an estimated five million people.

In 1965 an official for the Dow Chemical Corporation wrote an internal memo in which he recognised that dioxin was “exceptionally toxic ... [with] tremendous potential for producing chloracne [a skin disorder similar to acne] and…

Many activists have taken a crash course in US history thanks to Bill Blum. In Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (2002, see http://peacenews.info/issues/2441/2441351.html ) he took us through the unvarnished history of interventions, sabotage and deceit by the US government.

Now his 1986 book on the CIA, updated in 1995, has again been updated to bring us up to the end of 2003, incorporating new…

When a member of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, clinical psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, returns to a prison to interview, and finally to know, one of the behind-the-scenes murderers in the dreaded secret police, she faces not only a man who committed unspeakable deeds in his country, but she faces the universal questions of the nature of evil and human violence, the possibility of transformation and the human capacity for forgiveness.

The story of this…

April 2004 marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide, making this publication both timely and important. It uncovers a side of that terrible story largely hidden from public view. Shake Hands with the Devil is an intensely personal account, written by the head of the UN mission before and during the slaughter.

Informed that he was being posted to Rwanda, Lt General Dallaire remembers that the only information he had about the country was a photocopied page…

This is a book which makes a very useful contribution to the literature which already exists about the use of atomic weapons against Japan.

Noritaka Fukami was in Nagasaki at the time that the bomb was dropped. After the bomb fell he was involved in some of the rescue work within the city. Storm Over Nagasaki is a scroll depicting the bombing, and provides a visual record of what he and others experienced at the time.

Suffering from radiation sickness, he committed suicide in…

For hundreds of years Chechnya has been an itch on the underbelly of Russia - awkward to reach and irritatingly persistent. The most recent episodes of a shadowy and confused conflict are related in this autobiography of a Chechen surgeon who worked through the wars of the 1990s, armed only with a scalpel.

Khassan Baiev treated the wounded tirelessly and indiscriminately, faithful to the Hippocratic Oath to which the title refers and under which he had pledged to help anyone in need…

Contrary to its challenging title, Rethinking War and Peace has little that is new or radical to offer. It is a reasonable and readable statement of the case for war's abolition through active participation in peaceful alternatives, and anyone wholly new to the subject might find it a useful introduction. Readers of Peace News, on the other hand, will generally find themselves being told things they already know.

While there are many grounds for pessimism in the peace movement, this…

I've never reviewed a book before after reading just the introduction. However, I fully recommend this book on the basis of its impact on the person who now has my copy, my partner Yolanda. She teaches 12-14-year-olds in one of those schools that everybody knows is simply not coping - failing its pupils educationally, but also not coping with all the social problems dumped on it in its massified urban environment.

The day after I showed her the book, Yolanda suggested that she do a…

As the blurb to this sometimes excellent book goes, “by 2025 nearly two billion people will live in regions experiencing absolute water scarcity”.

Water, as some prescient reports from the UN and NGOs are starting to point out, will be the resource over which our future wars will break out. As the key to life, we've seen glimpses of a world in which water is seriously scarce, in African famines and Asian and American dust bowls; if the fight for oil is vicious, what might happen if…

OK - I confess, I am a Neal Stephenson fan (the sole purpose of my visits to bookshops at the moment is to ask whether his latest novel - Quicksilver - is out in paperback yet!). Before I stumbled across Zodiac I had already read his three other (predominantly sci-fi - sometimes called cyberpunk) novels and been entertained, intrigued and in the case of his epic - Cryptonomicon - been fascinated.

Zodiac is a great read, but in style and…

In a somewhat eccentric version of a road movie, Human Shields follows the 25 people who left England on double decker buses on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

Featuring plenty of interviews with the “shields”, the film shows some of the tensions and anxieties that inevitably began to unfold. Apart from a few admirable exceptions, the voices that we hear at the end of the film are not the same as those we heard at the beginning, illustrating how it was not necessarily those who…

Tired of the tedious and pitifully one-dimensional debates on the Iraq war that dominate the mainstream media? Got a sneaking suspicion that Tony Bliar may not be being entirely honest with us over WMD? Or simply want your convictions backed up with a wide range of well-researched and diverse articles? Buy this book. Despite the admission at the start that it was “produced at some speed”, it really is a quality little number.

It kicks off (after a typically sarky foreword from…