Reviews

‘But what about Nazi Germany?’ No doubt many Peace News readers have been asked this question when they have voiced support for nonviolence.

Summarising a range of published material, George Paxton shows that nonviolent resistance to Adolf Hitler’s government was widespread. And though it is often poorly-referenced and somewhat repetitive, this feels like one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time.

From underground newspapers, open letters, graffiti, and socially ostracising the occupiers, to slow…

How do children learn to follow societal norms and how do state institutions mould young people into citizens? In documenting how children are brought up in Denmark, this book makes a valuable contribution to the anthropological study of childhood.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork – including interviews and observations in pre-school daycare – the authors also bring together a range of material from pre-existing literature in the field, all of which is meticulously referenced.

Adapted, rather than directly translated, from a…

The idea that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene – an era characterised by humanity’s impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and wildlife – involves a drastic re-evaluation of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.However, the authors of this book insist that we have not just woken up to this fact in the last few decades. Indeed, far from being ignorant of the human imprint on the earth’s ‘living tissue’ – including the other species that occupy it – we have known about this from the dawn of industry.

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Much has been written about the Syrian uprisings, yet it’s only now with the English translation of this book that a comprehensive and politically-focused look at what’s been happening in the northern area of Syria (commonly known as ‘Rojava’ and part of a larger Kurdistan) has been easily available.

For the last 40 years, the Kurdish liberation struggle has been dominated by the PKK, which until recently was a Marxist-Leninist organisation struggling for a Kurdish nation-state. However, driven by their imprisoned leader Abdullah…

Historically there has been a general consensus across British politics and among British political commentators that the BBC is, by and large, an independent, left-leaning institution that serves the public interest. But, as readers of PN will know, especially when it comes to issues of war and peace, this is a myth.

Since its inception, the BBC has overwhelmingly served the interests of the government and elite sectors in society, a fact backed up by virtually every significant scholarly study on the matter.
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'Bohemians have occupied a semi-subversive status in modern society without being, in any consistent way, political-minded or even organised', notes Paul Buhle in his insightful introduction to this wonderful collection of comics.

Featuring almost 30 separate stories, artwork by over a dozen different artists, and with a a timeframe spanning over 100 years (one of the first stories tells the story of the New York-based Unitary Household, who practiced free love and critiqued gender roles in in the late 1850s) this is a book as wide-…

Don’t be deterred by this book’s hefty appearance or its purely historical premise. Using archival research, Sheila Rowbotham has retraced the lives of six US and British radicals in the late 19th century. Her commitment to mingling the personal and the political results in a fascinating mosaic of stories.

In the decades that Rowbotham reconstructs before our eyes, women could still not speak in public without ‘odium and ostracism’. Divorce and contraception were highly controversial. Yet this was also a time when belief in God…

With its black and yellow cover, featuring silhouettes of security cameras and other paraphernalia, at first glance this book looks intent on scaring the reader. Even the word ‘dispossessed’ in the title has classic horror film connotations. And perhaps this was the intention of the contributors, academics and activists who, in dismay at the failure of climate talks in 2009, came together for a seminar to discuss what should be done. The resulting papers comprise this volume, with accompanying chapters online.

The book’s main…

This book, now in a newly updated edition, begins with the hopeful reminder that capitalism is young compared with the human race, that its continuation is not inevitable and that there are many possibilities to build alternatives, some of which are explicitly against capitalism, while others seek to limit the damage it causes.

The urgency of the message, as the S.O.S. in the title suggests, is that in a world of limited resources, a system that relies on growth threatens the existence of the human race, if not the planet itself…

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 Ripper’ (Peter Sutcliffe, who murdered 13 women,…

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 tells Rumplestiltskin.)

Offering an…

A professor of journalism at the University of Texas, Robert Jensen has a long history of activism focussing on US foreign policy, progressive journalism, climate change and pornography.

With The End of Patriarchy, he makes a strong, often deeply personal, case for radical feminism, which he believes has lost significant ground to individualistic liberal feminism and postmodern feminism in the broader culture and academia, respectively. For Jensen, the central tenet of radical feminism is the ‘understanding that men’s…

Trans is an autobiography by Juliet Jacques, a trans woman who previously wrote a series about her transition for the Guardian. Jacques cleverly interweaves trans history, and the focus on transness in various forms of entertainment, with her own experiences, creating an intelligent, honest, and powerful account of life as a trans woman, making this a wonderful resource for trans and gender-questioning people.

She opens by talking about her sex reassignment surgery, a point which is often considered a sort of…

Human beings are social creatures and the effects of loneliness are deeply harmful to us, to our health and our mental state. We are inclined towards altruism and community but an obsession with individualism is driving us into isolation. And this separation can be useful to those in power: a community of people working together is not so easy to control as a fragmented society of apparently disparate individuals.

George Monbiot believes that loneliness has become an epidemic and this album – a collaboration with the Scottish…

‘Most humans are neither rich nor famous, but working people. Their story needs to be told.’ This book is a loudspeaker for those forgotten voices, the majority whose lives are determined by those with blue blood or laden pockets.

Even from the commoner’s perspective, dealing with history always involves interpretation. Depending on which political wing you stand on, the French Revolution was either an appalling display of mob fury or a victory giving birth to modern democracy.

I’d encourage any reader to dip in and…