Virginia Moffatt
I’m a terribly picky reader and my PN reviews can be a little, shall we say, critical? So it’s a delight to be given a book that deserves the plaudits it has received from the likes of Mairead Maguire Corrigan, Daniel Ellsberg and Bruce Kent.
Reading What Nobel Really Wanted reminded me of a great Polyps cartoon – Jesus’ Last Words. As Jesus hangs on the cross the caption reads, “And I don’t want anyone to go twisting what I’ve said into an excuse for a load of right wing bullshit……
Given how frequently the international community uses violence to resolve political conflicts, it is perhaps not surprising that film and TV reflect this. The myth of redemptive violence is a powerful and familiar cultural theme, and, as the excellent documentary Tough Guise (Media Education Foundation) points out, our heroes get tougher and stronger, carrying bigger weapons each year. So it’s always refreshing to find a TV programme prepared to accept that life is more complex than this.…
The trouble with short story anthologies is that you can never quite tell what you’re going to get. Unless you are familiar with all the writers in the collection, you just have to dive in and hope for the best. Welcome to the Greenhouse is a typical anthology in this regard. Since I’m not a sci-fi fan I’d never heard of any of the authors, and so I dipped in not knowing what to expect.
What I got was a mixed bag. Some fine stories, some dull, some too badly written to finish. The…
In February, “Unite for Peace”, a group of (mainly) Christian peace activists affiliated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, gathered in Derbyshire for our twice-yearly meeting. This weekend was particularly special as it was our tenth anniversary – an opportunity to step back and think about previous gatherings and what it is that keeps us together.
We all live in different parts of the country and have busy jobs, and some of us have families too. It’s an effort to take time out…
I don’t doubt that this is an important book, it’s got a quote from Chomsky on the front, so it must be. And there are plenty of powerful stories in it that need to be heard. But, I did struggle to love it, which might perhaps be my problem.
I think it’s partly stylistic – the writer does tend to describe events in rather breathless “action hero” mode when a simpler clearer prose might do. But it’s also infused at other times with the kind of earnest dourness that gives the peace…
I’m currently in training for the London Marathon (more details here), a slightly mad endeavour which means putting myself through increasing long runs in and around Oxford. I tend to find I do a lot of musing as I run, and it crossed my mind the other week that my experience actually might be be of use in the event of getting caught in a kettle. Since there’s a rather big protest coming up this weekend with kettling…
The poetics of the Zapatistas should have been a perfect read. I’ve been fascinated by the Zapatista movement, ever since they stormed into San Cristobel in January 1994, and my sister Lucy (who lived in Mexico at the time) has often enthused of the literary quality of Subcomandante Marcos’s writing. So why was this book such a let down in parts?
Part of the problem was, I think, the author isn’t quite sure who his audience is. The title and front cover (a masked Zapatista doll…
Chris’ recent stay in Wandsworth Prison has led to some interesting conversations lately. And that’s got me thinking about when I became a pacifist and why I still am one.
I’m not sure I can pinpoint an exact moment in my life when pacifism made sense to me. But I know the milestones. The first was reading the World War 1 poets – particularly Wilfred Owen - whose lines in…
To all intents and purposes, last Wednesday was a normal day. I dropped my husband, Chris Cole, in Headington and watched him walk away in the darkness to the London bus, as I often do. Then I headed back home for the usual morning routine of breakfast, sandwich making, and the school run.
But last Wednesday was different in one respect. For the second time in four years, Chris was returning to Westminster Magistrates to “wilfully refuse” to pay a fine he’d incurred during an …
“We have been attacked while in international waters…the Israelis have behaved like pirates”. So says Henning Mankell describing the infamous attack by the Israeli army on the Gaza Aid Freedom Flotilla earlier this year. His piece is just one in a fine collection of articles edited by Moustafa Bayoumi, and published with admirable rapidity as a rebuttal to the official Israeli version of events.
This is an excellent resource for activists which provides both eyewitness accounts of the…
At first sight, a book about a Christian minister’s engagement with Islam might appear to have limited value to the non-religious reader.
However, I believe, this book has something to teach all of us working for peace and justice. And in these times when the nature of Islam is so misrepresented and misunderstood, Ray Gaston’s story is little short of revolutionary.
This book is part-autobiography, as we follow Ray on his path to a greater understanding of Islam, and part-…
Within this book, there’s a thoughtful treatise against climate change struggling to get out. It never quite makes it, which is a shame, as Alastair McIntosh has some important things to say. One of the main problems is structure. Part one deals with the science of climate change and political dilemmas; part two, with a spiritual response.
The trouble with this approach is that the book becomes neither one thing nor the other, particularly when the style veers between dense analysis…
They say that families live prison sentences just as much as the prisoner and that was certainly true for us. On January 22, my husband Chris Cole was sentenced to 28 days imprisonment for non-payment of a fine incurred at an anti-war protest in 2005.
This event was not a surprise to us, we had been planning for it in one way or another ever since we first met. However, recognising something is inevitable and dealing with the actual experience are two separate things.
The…
In popular myth, the Second World War has been cast as the last just war. Since Hitler was an evil tyrant who murdered millions of Jewish people, Britain and America had no option but to fight him. Churchill and Roosevelt were towering heroes, who did everything they could to minimise the effects of war on civilians, in order to rescue Europe from oppression.
Human Smoke is a welcome debunking of this legend. In it, Nicholson Baker has put together an impressive account of the origins…
Flying Close to the Sun tells how Cathy Wilkerson transformed herself from a nice middle class girl to a violent revolutionary. Describing how she became involved in left-wing politics as a student, the book charts her developing understanding of the political issues of the 1960s and ’70s and how she begins to see violence as a possible tool to respond to injustice.
Wilkerson is at her best when she describes the debates around the formation of the Weather Underground and the…
