Review

In his introduction to this beautiful memoir, the late Edward Said says: what gives this book an unmistakeable stamp of profound authenticity is its life-affirming poetic texture. This is no surprise as Barghouti is indeed a poet of great sensitivity, he is the author of nine books of poetry; few of his poems are translated into English. For us in the English-speaking minority world, the idea that there is a body of Palestinian literature is probably as remote and unbelievable as…

The blurb on the back of this book augurs well. “In the aftermath of 9/11, America has been haunted by one question: Why do they hate us?” Perhaps, one thinks, some intelligent discussion by a leading US commentator (Pintak is a veteran journalist who has reported on the Middle East for many of the big names of the international English-language media) of why the USA has become such a symbol of oppression for so many. Progression to the next few sentences reveals that such hopes may be…

This document is described by its author as a, “response to the conviction that protest alone will not make a sufficient impact on the status quo”.

Carey begins by setting out the major threats facing the world today, both in his own words and through extensive quotations from other writers. Much of what appears in the opening section, titled “Prognosis”, will be familiar to PN readers.

This first section is followed by an excellent critique of the environmental, social and…

This is a book which has three separate - but related - parts to it. It starts with an essay by Micah Ian Wright entitled “Moment of Clarity”, in which he writes about his experiences in the US military during the invasion of Panama in 1989 - something which made him question the aims of US foreign policy, and which eventually led him to his remixed poster project.

The most striking part of this work is the remixed (mainly) US military propaganda posters taken from WW1 and WW2 and…

The recent death of Edward Said robbed the Palestinians of their most eloquent advocate in the West. One of the most committed and articulate of Palestinian allies still with us however, is the Professor of International Law at Illinois University, Francis A Boyle. Boyle has produced a tool for the reader “to go out and work for peace with justice for all peoples and states in the Middle East”.

While eschewing polemic for an analysis that is rooted in international legal principles…

For all its failings, it's sometimes worth reminding oneself that some of the best journalists (as well as some of the worst!) work for the corporate media. Amira Hass is one such reporter.

The daughter of survivors of the Nazi holocaust, Hass was, until September 2002, the chief West Bank and Gaza correspondent for Ha'aretz, Israel's leading liberal daily. Between 1993 and 1997 she lived in Gaza - the only Jewish Israeli journalist to have done so - covering the Oslo “peace” process…

Had they not become leaders in the field of exposing government spin doctoring and propaganda, you suspect that Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber would make pretty effective PR consultants themselves.

I recently spotted Weapons of Mass Deception riding high in the best-seller lists in a mainstream British bookstore. How many of those buying it were seduced by the snappy title and the Saddam/Bin Laden comic-strip on the cover? Those expecting the Michael Moore approach to US…

At times worryingly naïve this is a book that goes some way to readdress the myth of “transition” in Post Soviet Russia.

Packed with tables and charts there is no doubt that Mssrs Haynes and Hasan have done serious research, and it shows. They avoid many of the cliche's that appear in books about Russia: centuries of endurance, the mysterious Russian Soul etc, and for anyone new to that part of the world, the facts and figures of (Post)Soviet life and death will be truly horrific.…

This book is fascinating, funny, at times truly hopeful - and at others pretty despairing - and certainly provocative. It took a year for the publishers to send it to us, and a further six months for me to find the time to read and review it. However, it has been worth the wait. If you are interested in the politics of technology in any way - read this book. It will stimulate your mind and make you ask questions.

Its author is frequently referred to as a “guru of cyborg…

One of the hardest tasks for a writer to do well is to write an authorised history of an organisation devoted to social justice. It is easy to write a public relations puff piece, avoiding mention of internal divisions and crisis that hurt the organisation and potentially affect its image. The authors avoided this trap.

It felt strange to read about the origins and struggles of an organisation that seems to have always been around. In my more than 30 years of activism there has been…

If protest is to achieve anything, it should offer both a means and an end in itself. That is to say, the act should serve the location and situation in hand and, ideally, should energise those participating to further actions. Ordeal is not hugely conducive to spirited resistance.

If this all sounds either obvious or prescriptive, the point is only made because of the fundamental role media responses play in determining the success or failure of any act. So much of the time,…

“...The rebels search each other out. They walk toward one another. They find each other and together break other fences.” Part of the scene-setting statement from the latest volume to claim space on the shelf marked “new world order, resistance to”. Have we been here before? And yet... sometimes a book, a film, an action, grouping or artefact feels like a step shift, feels like it embodies a significant new dimension of thought or relevance.

With this 500 page “brick” of a book,…

As a follow up to the highly successful UK version, PNW people have teamed up with Mordam Records in the dis-United States to release this new Peace not War 2-CD compilation.

With 32 tracks, ranging from Crass, Midnight Oil and Chumbawamba to Ani Di Franco, Seize the Day and Ms Dynamite, they have produced an amazingly strong message to Bush, Blair and their buddies: that any future invasion of an oil rich state is not going to be allowed to happen. This is music that reawakens…

Empire has never completely gone out of style, but now in the early 21st Century it has very become popular for describing the current international system. In particular, there is a growing recognition that the United States is an empire. 1 Of course, most of the world saw the US this way already, but it comes as a bit of a shock to the “homeland.”

Accepting the “new” US Empire is usually linked to the claim that the US is the only remaining superpower and that it…

It is a sign of the times that books about the international use of military muscle are increasingly about “intervention” rather than “war”, and that the interventions most often discussed are “humanitarian” ones.

While not all of the thirteen papers in this collection are primarily concerned with humanitarian intervention, that is the single most dominant theme. The countries most often mentioned are Rwanda and Kosovo. They provide obvious focal points for the discussion. As the…