Carlyle, Gabriel

Carlyle, Gabriel

Gabriel Carlyle

1 April 2017Review

PM Press, 2016; 128pp; £11.99

Donald Rooum has been drawing cartoons for PN since (at least) 1962, and PM’s new selection of his work – many of them featuring his most famous creation, the anarchist moggie Wildcat – takes on a wide variety of familiar targets: religion, the military, police surveillance, the monarchy and capitalism. But we’re also treated to Rooum’s delightfully offbeat takes on Rumplestiltskin and the Garden of Eden (‘When you’re not blackmailing, you quite turn me on’, the miller’s daughter…

1 April 2017Review

Myriad Editions, 2015; 224pp; £14.99

Beautiful, disturbing and timely, Becoming Unbecoming uses the medium of the graphic novel to brilliant effect in exploring that ‘something embedded deep within [our] culture that produces eruptions of gendered violence and allows them to flourish’.

Becoming Unbecoming dovetails an account of the author’s own experiences of rape and sexual abuse during her childhood in West Yorkshire in the mid-to-late 1970s with the history of the police hunt for the so-called ‘Yorkshire…

1 February 2017Review

OR Books, 2016; 128pp; £10

The writer and radical Walter Mosley is best known for his crime novels, in particular those featuring his African-American private investigator Easy Rawlins, hero of the best-selling Devil in a Blue Dress. But Mosley’s prolific output also includes science fiction, erotica, non-genre fiction and five short political tracts addressing issues such as race and US foreign policy.

In this, his latest foray into politics, he turns to economics, proposing a ‘shotgun wedding’…

1 December 2016News

Global South takes lead on zero-carbon future as climate denier elected US president

A Reclaim the Power climate action Critical Mass bike ride around Heathrow on 1 October involved over 100 cyclists, slowing traffic in and out of the airport. Inside the airport, over 100 protesters staged a flash mob die-in, with testimonies from Global South communities affected by climate change. The bike block visited Harmondsworth detention centre to link climate change, drought and mass migration. The actions were part of an international day of action, with events in Turkey and…

1 December 2016Review

Guardian Faber Publishing, 2016; 320pp; £16.99

Last year, excluding suicides, over 13,000 people in the US – including roughly 2,500 children and teenagers – were killed by firearms. In 2012 – the most recent year for which comparable statistics are available – the number of gun murders per capita in the US was nearly 30 times that in the UK.

Yet, though ‘each individual death is experienced as a family tragedy that ripples through a community,’ notes Gary Younge ‘the sum total barely earns a national shrug’. Indeed, with the…

1 October 2016Review

 OR Books, 2013; 157pp; £11

According to Andrew Smart, ‘a sharp increase in idleness, absenteeism, laziness, and non-industriousness’ might be ‘the most effective way to bring about positive social and political change’. Should activists take note?

‘In our hysterical rush to make money, gain status, compete for scarce jobs, jockey for promotions, make our kids athletic and intellectual geniuses, and organize our lives down to the second,’ Smart writes ‘we are suppressing our brain’s natural ability to make…

1 October 2016Review

OR Books, 2015; 268pp; £12

In 2014, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking told the BBC: ‘The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’ ‘Whereas the short-term impact of [artificial intelligence] depends on who controls it,’ he later wrote, ‘the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all’.

Andrew Smart shares these concerns and proposes that, should superintelligent machines ever be developed, they should be given ‘the digital equivalent of LSD…

1 August 2016Review

PM Press, 2016; 160pp; $13

It is 2041 and atmospheric CO2 levels have passed 600 parts per million, leading to the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and a three-metre rise in sea levels. Florida is underwater and world population has passed 10 billion. A few billion are stateless refugees. ‘A few billion more [are] indentured or imprisoned.’

Every cultivated acre on Earth is planted with sterile genetically-engineered varieties whose terminator genes have been implanted to protect corporate profits…

1 June 2016Review

Macmillan, 2016; 442pp; £25

In 1936, not long after Franco launched his fascist coup against Spain’s elected government, the legendary US pacifist Dave Dellinger, then in his early 20s, travelled to the embattled republic as part of a delegation of students.

‘For an agonising 24 hours,’ he later wrote, ‘I wrestled with the urge to pick up the gun in the anti-fascist cause. In the background, as I paced the streets of Madrid were the sounds of the battle, a few miles away. Spanish friends I had come to love…

1 June 2016Review

Fitzcaraldo Editions, 2015; 216pp; £12.99

Before its use in the context of war and peace, the term ‘conscientious objector’ referred to someone who refused vaccination.

In 1853, Britain’s Vaccination Act made the vaccination of infants compulsory. Despite fines, imprisonment and the seizure of their property, vaccination was widely resisted by working-class people, who sometimes likened their predicament to slavery. Their resistance finally led to the introduction of a ‘conscience clause’ in 1898.

Early…

1 February 2016Review

Trinity University Press, 2015; 344pp; $17.95

There are some non-fiction writers who are always interesting and informative to read, whatever the topic, but the US writer and journalist Rebecca Solnit is this and something else.

A wonderfully lyrical writer, she is probably best known among activists as the author of the 2004 book Hope in the Dark, her brilliant meditation on why it’s ‘always too soon to go home... always too soon to calculate effect’. And, alongside activism and geography, hope is also a key theme…

1 February 2016Review

Verso, 2015; 224pp; £9.99

The extraordinary life of Rosa Luxemburg – Marxist economist, cat-lover and legendary figure of the revolutionary left – is given a memorable graphic novel treatment in Kate Evans’ latest book.

A ‘fictional representation of factual events’, it takes us from her childhood in Poland (tasked by her school with writing a poem for the visit of the German kaiser, she produced one attacking ‘that creeping toad Bismarck’), through her pre-First World War revolutionary agitation in Poland…

1 December 2015Review

Green Print, 2013; 258pp; £10 (vol 1) / Green Print 2015; 258pp; £10

From the first recorded strike in human history (by Egyptian artisans in 1170 BCE) to a successful sex strike by Colombian women in 2011 (‘No more sex. We want our road’), civil resistance – ‘collective action for political or social ends without any systematic recourse to violence’ – has had a long and varied history.

It also looks set to have a long and varied future. Indeed, according to the authors of these books, there has been a greater tendency in recent decades for popular…

1 December 2015Review

Veterans of Hope Project, 2015; 76pp; $8.99

Described by Cornel West as a ‘secular bible for a new social movement’, Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book The New Jim Crow argued that the US prison system – the destination for one-in-three Black US males during their lifetime, compared with one-in-17 of their white contemporaries – had become ‘a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control’, functioning in a manner ‘strikingly similar to Jim Crow’ – the system of government-sanctioned racial…

1 December 2015Review

PM Press, 2015;188pp; $12

A self-described ‘socialist-anarchist-feminist’, the US activist and writer Marge Piercy is the author of 17 novels, spanning a wide range of different genres including science fiction, as well as one of North America’s best-selling poets.

Nonetheless, this latest addition to PM’s excellent ‘Outspoken Authors’ series eschews fiction to focus on ‘essays, rants and railleries’. The latter cover a wide variety of topics, including abortion, homelessness, censorship, the tragedy of…