Review

This interesting, engaging and often humorous CD is the edited recording of a lecture given in the summer of 1997 at Colorado College in the US by radical activist and academic Angela Davis.

At the core of this fairly simple lecture is the exposing of links between capitalism, racism and the prison system - and this is done fairly eloquently on the whole.

Drawing on her own prison experience and the experiences of her friends and comrades, combined with a professed ex-…

It's hard to know what the objective of this book is. The title and blurb make it sound like a book on women on death row. Actually, it's Kathleen O'Shea's autobiography, interspersed at paragraph intervals with excerpts from interviews with ten other women, all ofthem on death row in the USA.

When this format works it is very powerful; often it is a harrowing reminder that the social and psychological forces which result in some women - innocent or guilty - ending up on death row…

Is there a nonviolent alternative to military intervention in those situations which cry out for some kind of international response? In Bosnia, for example, or Kosova,or Rwanda? This is the main challenge which has led to recurrent attempts to undertake cross-border interventions and to establish a permanent peace brigade or “peace army”.

The attempts to date have met with varying degrees of success depending in part on the kind of situation being confronted and the methods adopted…

As an antimilitarist and probably a feminist, I rather liked this diary. While it has, in some ways, quite a US orientation (national holidays, significant events, the relationship between days and dates etc), it is still perfectly usable for anyone using the Christian-derived calendar.

It has a one week to a page display, plus a directory of WRI members, and a list of national (US) peace organisations and publications. However I think the best thing about this diary is the profiles…

This is a book which looks at what has traditionally been regarded as “gun running”, but which is in reality a covert aspect of many nations' foreign policy.

This covers the “small arms” (guns and rifles to you and me), which are used to fuel many of the world's civil wars. This includes arms that are also sold on, from nation to nation and from nation to insurrectionary groups, as a form of covert government activity. Plus arms which might publicly be represented as a form of aid to…

“Only one thing can reverse the corporate take-over of Britain. It's you” ends Captive State and, wow,given the extent of corporate capture of public life that the book describes, what a task you will have. A long road ahead then, butat least mapped and made so much more comprehensible by Monbiot's Manifesto of Multinational Malevolence.

That's not really a fair reference - whilst the book makes compelling reading and calls for some response, Monbiot avoids painting a cliche'd…

This fundraiser CD for Survival -the campaign group supporting tribal people - makes very easy listening. Billed as “A fusion of chilled tribal beats, ambient dub and trance music”, it certainly is!

While it has several tracks from famous artists, such as Leftfield, and Banco de Gaia, it also showcases less well-known performers, and all cite tribal influences in their music.

Basically it starts off very chilled, builds up to a more busy and dancey middle section - with tracks…

This is a guide to a trip every activist should take. There is, of course, only one rogue state -the United States of America. Any evil deed of the US that an activist can imagine in the wildest of paranoid dreams is described and referenced in this comprehensive guide by Blum, a journalist and ex-US State Department official.

In spite of the efforts of US leaders to make their actions appear humanitarian and democratic, Blum makes it clear that the US has run a global protection…