A list of reviews up to 2012
Imagine travelling the world in your dreams, navigating your way through its war zones with a set of dream maps – maps with some of the traditions of Western cartography, indications of lines of longitude and latitude, perhaps the outlines of countries – as well as beautiful colours rising off the land.
Bomb after Bomb is an atlas of places the United States has bombed, stretching from 19th century Nicaragua to 21st century Iraq, using hypnotically beautiful paintings by US artist…
”We would hardly be notorious characters if they had left us alone in the streets of Chicago last year.”
So said Tom Hayden
A plaudit for this book calls it “proof that you don't have to stop rockin' once you become a parent”.
Having never started rockin', I'm perhaps not the intended audience but found it an interesting addition to the panoply of parenting books I've read over the past four years. The book started life as columns for US zine Maximum Rock and Roll, on the theme of “punk parent[ing]”, and much of the content reflects this origin.
There is some useful stuff here, not covered in other…
Blood-soaked mass-murderer Henry Kissinger once infamously asserted (to Chile's foreign minister) that, “Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.” In reality, as this book makes abundantly clear, the supposedly civilised “north” has much to learn from the south - and not just from the third world, but also from the even older “fourth world”…
There are different ways of criticising the media. One method has just been demonstrated by Nick Davies, Guardian journalist, in his recent book Flat Earth News, which has received a mostly favourable reception in the industry that he excoriates.
There are three broad approaches to media criticism: conspiracy theory, internal debate and institutional critique.
The conspiracy theory accuses certain powerful individuals of acting outside their institutional…
There are at least three hundred thousand widows in Baghdad alone, and a further one million throughout Iraq, with their numbers rising daily. City of Widows is a timely reminder of the continuing calamitous affect of the Iraq war, particularly on Iraqi women. It interweaves Zangana's personal story of resistance, imprisonment and torture under Saddam Hussein with a history of Iraq from the early twentieth century to the present day.
The promotion of women's rights was given as a…
Informed Choice? - which created a considerable stir in the media when it was released earlier this year - is essential reading for anyone with an interest in any aspect of the armed forces recruitment practice and how they treat their personnel.
Clear and comprehensive, Gee documents how recruitment literature emphasises the attractive aspects of military life, while glossing over the restrictions, risks and possible psychological pitfalls - with the word “kill” being notable by its…
Man-made climate change is scientific fact, but consensus about its social meaning is still a way off. Why are we doing so little about it? Can resource use be uncoupled from quality of life? Is humanity's desire to consume really stronger than its desire to survive?
This activist-academic initiative is welcome, though parts of it are idealistic, polemical and woolly. The editors propose unspecified radical change in response to global warming and do not try to engage with liberal…
The War on Terror game is an enjoyable board game about terrorists, governments, evil empires and people fighting for freedom.
It's a cross between Risk and Settlers of Catan. Risk is a game where the purpose is world conquest, and Settlers of Catan is a brilliant game where you use the resources of the land you are on, such as wool, wood, ore etc to build roads, towns, cities. Settlers is all about trading the resources you have access to with other players for ones that you don't…
The ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has the unfortunate distinction of being the world's biggest “forgotten emergency” according to a 2005 poll of experts by Reuters. The numbers are staggering, with the International Rescue Committee recently estimating that over 5 million people have died since 1998, the majority due to preventable diseases and starvation aggravated by the fighting.
Extensively referenced, with a useful chronology of events and a map to guide…
A political biography of both Thabo Mbeki and the ANC since taking power, this book explores and evaluates the frustrations of the ANC's transformation from a national liberation movement to a strongly centrist political party committed to market-based economic policies. Packed with detail and context, the book can be read as a thorough introduction to current South African politics or as “what went wrong in post-liberation South Africa”.
Gumede gives an insight into the consequences…
Despite his loud protestations to the contrary, Martin Amis's collected essays about the post-9/11 world demonstrate that he is indeed hostile to, and fearful of, Islam as a religion. At times in The Second Plane, Amis is careful to distinguish between Islam, the world religion, and “Islamism”, a violent and intolerant strand of belief.
Over and over again, however, Amis lets slip his underlying prejudices. In a chapter on “demographics”, he relays uncritically some scaremongering…
Under the Bombs is a stunning and intensely moving film set amongst the physical and emotional devastation of Lebanon under the Israeli onslaught of 2006.
The storyline is simple yet powerful: Zeina arrives in Beirut on a desperate mission to find her son in the confusion and terror of war-ravaged southern Lebanon.
Taxi driver Tony, a Christian, whilst initially motivated by making a fast buck, is drawn into Zeina's odyssey. Taking strength from each other, they see the quest…
Though a disproportionately white affair, the peace movement is a close relative of the anti-fascist, anti-racist and anti-apartheid struggles that form a key strand in this wonderful selection from the Getty Images photo archive. As Paul Gilroy notes in the thought-provoking essay, while this is “not a book for black people only”, the history it marks out is, even now, one which “those who are complacent, powerful and indifferent to the suffering of Britain's minorities find easy to…
Why do we need another book on climate change? According to George Marshall, because climate change is “the greatest moral challenge we have ever faced” but is generally presented in a way which is “baffling, boring, and irrelevant” (oh, and we're all in denial about it anyway).
He aims - by presenting only the bare scientific facts, and concentrating on the essential issue of how to come to terms with the problem we face and reduce our personal emissions - to give us a book which…
