A list of reviews up to 2012
On 24 October, Lance Corporal Joe Glenton made headlines by being the first serving British soldier to take part in an anti-war demonstration. Glenton’s courageous stand against the unpopular war in Afghanistan is certainly welcome, but, as Dahr Jamail highlights in The Will to Resist, the UK trails far behind the US when it comes to resistance among the armed forces to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
A US journalist who has reported from Iraq on the devastation wreaked upon…
These two books offer criticisms of capitalism from very different perspectives.
Shutt, a left-leaning economist, argues that the ongoing crisis within capitalism has arisen from the growing redundancy of capital since the 1970s. With too much capital sloshing around, the rich have found it increasingly hard to find investments that can deliver the profits they expect, resorting to taking high risks that make the whole edifice increasingly fragile.
Shutt attacks the laissez-…
As a young South African lawyer, Albie Sachs defended his clients on charges brought under apartheid laws, was detained and tortured with sleep deprivation, went into exile, and lost an arm and an eye when South African security agents put a bomb in his car.
Following the end of apartheid, Sachs was appointed to the constitutional court by Nelson Mandela. This book is the fascinating story of an activist and lawyer given the opportunities, first to help write his country’s new…
Since setting up the Media Lens website (www.medialens.org) in 2002, David Edwards and David Cromwell have been publishing regular media alerts “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”, encouraging readers to write directly to individual journalists to take them to task.
Largely made up of edited versions of these alerts, Newspeak in the 21st Century’s central thesis is that there is “a profound, consistent bias favouring…
This installation by the young, internationally-acclaimed Jerusalem-born Fast presents an original and often disturbing insight into the plight of asylum seekers and their struggle to be heard.
One film depicts an asylum seeker from a dystopian Britain seeking asylum in Africa. The preceding two films show, respectively, a dramatised interview between the artist and an asylum seeker in London, and a brief piece of original footage.
The films are five, 10 and 30 minutes in…
In 2004 a group of fundamentalist Christians sitting on a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, voted to make their students “aware of… other theories of evolution, including, but not limited to, intelligent design” – creationism’s latest Trojan horse.
Eleven committed parents – including a Girl Scout leader, a devout Catholic and a physics teacher who taught summer Bible school – decided to take a stand, and sued the board for violation of their first amendment rights (“separation of…
Between the summer of 1918 and the following spring about 230,000 people died in Britain from a deadly strain of influenza, popularly called Spanish Flu. The toll worldwide may have been as high as 100 million. This book describes the pandemic in Britain making use of unpublished testimonies of survivors and the memoirs of doctors, soldiers, and civil servants.
The title comes from a rhyme sung by children at the time: “I had a little bird / Its name was Enza / I opened the window /…
This Handbook has been put together by an international committee with the aim of creating a useful tool for those working for social change. However, unlike many similar books birthed in British or North American activist movements, this one is written from a global perspective and is all the richer for it, providing a broader view of both how nonviolent actions can be used and the type of people who are involved in such activism.
Written in a clear and succinct style, it’s a…
This amazing book is a political treatise, personal journal, lively commentary, an invaluable history and a guidebook to sustained activism, all in one volume. This is a work to be read and consulted for many years.
In 2005 activist Angie Zelter and her friends contemplated the weakening of the peace movement and its lack of energy. Instead of moaning and hand-wringing they created an ambitious plan to galvanise British activists. They came up with the idea to blockade Faslane in…
“At last a book on conscientious objection to military service from the point of view of contemporary objectors. It expresses the critique objection poses to patriarchy and social militarization and firmly places objection in the context of struggle for social transformation” – that’s my enthusiastic and heartfelt endorsement on the back cover of this book.
It is absolutely genuine – and not just because I’m friendly with one of the editors and some of the contributors, or because I…
Just over a year ago (PN 2497), we suggested there was a convergence of views of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X in their later years, in particular their growing convictions that overcoming class oppression was central to black liberation.
We quoted King in 1966: “something is wrong with capitalism… there must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move towards a Democratic Socialism”; and 1967: “capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black…
Waging what one of his aides termed a “war on sleep”, Martin Luther King Jr spent the last months of his life trying to organise the Poor People’s Campaign: a new inter-racial, class-based movement among the poor, in which he hoped black preachers would play a key galvanising role.
Fighting insuperable odds to bring this vision to reality, King also found himself sucked into the struggle of striking sanitation workers in Memphis – and discovered that workers, ministers, unionists and…
Professor Peter Hennessy is a tremendously well-connected insider, who has over the years lifted the lid on Whitehall in a way that no other historian has managed. His latest book Cabinets and the Bomb is perhaps the ultimate in revelation, in that it reproduces (photographically) top secret cabinet documents relating to the most sensitive topic in British politics: the British nuclear arsenal.
62 documents from 1940 to 2007 are presented (often in full), along with explanatory text,…
This book is not an easy read in any sense of the term and hardly anyone emerges from its pages with much credit. It lays bare, in great detail, the origins of the present conflict in Darfur and how it has unfolded in recent years. Needless to say, the true picture is considerably more complex than that presented by the mass media which, in any event, were somewhat late upon the scene.
“Until March 2004, Darfur’s crisis unfolded in the typical manner of African civil wars, unremarked…
