Reviews

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’, to help them develop an ‘ecological sensitivity…

The Bleeding Edge deftly exposes the catastrophic impacts of inequality, exploding the myth that technology has brought us ‘the best of all possible worlds.’ Examining the lives of workers at the bleeding edge of our high-tech world, Bob Hughes explains how the ‘escalating human impact on the earth has gone hand in hand with successful encroachments on egalitarian culture.’

A central argument of the book is that capitalism has given us gadgets that we did not ask for and do not need. Yet governments and corporations have…

Linda Stout starts her book with a successful mobilisation that dwindled rapidly and is now almost forgotten – the US ‘Nuclear Freeze’ campaign of the early 1980s. She points out: ‘Supported by 70 percent or more of the [US] population, the freeze was endorsed by 275 city governments, 12 state legislatures, and the voters in nine out of ten states where it was placed on the ballot in the fall of 1982.’

The Freeze campaigners demanded an end to the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons materials, warheads and…

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 meaning out of experience.’

Moreover, ‘…

In her foreword to this short story collection, publisher Meike Ziervogel writes that she ‘commissioned Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes to go to the Calais refugee camp to distil stories into a work of fiction about escape, hope and aspiration.’

The ethical challenge of distilling the stories of people living so precariously into a work of fiction is clear: the charge of exploitation lies in ambush behind every sentence. This risky endeavour has paid off, however, producing a poignant and indelible work of fiction and a…

Reviewing Noam Chomsky’s first book in 1969, Robert Sklar wrote in The Nation that the importance of American Power and the New Mandarins lay in its power ‘to free our minds from old perspectives, to stimulate new efforts at historical, political and social thought’.

Chomsky’s latest book, Who Rules the World? is at least as powerful in ‘freeing our minds’. Chomsky is not a sloganeer – in his very first sentence he admits that ‘The question raised by the title of this book cannot have a simple and…

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. ‘There [isn’t] a live food plant left anywhere on…

As the title suggests, boats of all kinds – inflatables, wooden fishing boats and vessels whose leaking engine fumes poison their passengers – are a central theme of this book. Another is the poignant list of items that refugees carry with them: handbags, hair gel, babies’ nappies, a box of soap powder.

With these details Patrick Kingsley brings together some of the many personal stories of refugees themselves, as they travel to Europe from sub-Saharan Africa, Syria, and Afghanistan.

In the first part of the book, we…

As a call for collective liberation against systemic forms of oppression, solidarity remains one of the left’s most powerful and enduring ideas. However, while the notion has been mobilised by a wide range of activist struggles over the centuries, this has often occurred without a clear articulation of what it means in practice.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of critiques and studies examining what it means to be an ally and how one goes about effective solidarity work. This book places itself squarely within this…

Published a few weeks before the EU referendum, Richard Seymour’s latest book is an important and timely intervention into Labour party – and national – politics.

Seymour, a former member of the Socialist Workers Party, is known as one of the sharpest intellects on the Left, and his sympathetic analysis of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership doesn’t disappoint.

There is a welcome recap of the heady days of summer 2015, when the unassuming MP for North Islington – backed by grassroots activists, enthusiastic…

What has a classical economist’s dinner, prepared by his mother centuries ago, got to do with the peace movement? Well, if you want to introduce someone to a different way of looking at the world – challenging unspoken, yet dominant , assumptions about how we should live together in peace on this planet – then this little book would make an excellent gift.

Pithy and fact-filled, it’s a tale of the dominance of ‘economic man’, with Swedish author Katrine Marçal taking the reader on a whirlwind tour of the major economic theories…

There can’t be many books reviewed in PN that have been compared to the writings of James Joyce and also need the help of www.urbandictionary.com to explain their vocabulary. But please don’t let either of these facts put you off reading this beautifully-written coming of age story!

The book opens with a map of Baltimore in the 1980s, annotated with the contemporary version of ‘Here be Dragons’ (‘Leakin Park – body dump for those taken by murder most foul’), followed…

Renting from an unscrupulous private landlord can mean cold rooms, damage to your health and lack of privacy. Worst of all is the insecurity of a ‘no fault’ eviction, legal under Section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act, making it difficult for tenants to make long-term plans, or for their children to settle in school.

Drawing on their own careful research and one author’s personal experience of eviction, this book exposes the realities of living in privately-rented accommodation in the UK.

Through interviews with landlords…

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 and admire were on their way to the front, some of…

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 vaccine refusers were also ‘among the first to…