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…You got that?” The premise of Heffermehl’s book is…
As the last “male principal speaker” for the Green Party for England and Wales, the author of numerous books on environmentalism and a lecturer in political economy, Derek Wall is well placed to write on Green politics.
Due to the quickening climate crisis, it is a politics he describes, in the No-nonsense Guide, as one “of survival”. Wall manages to pack a lot of interesting information and ideas into a short book, including summaries of what he sees as the four pillars of Green political thought: ecology, social justice, grassroots…
The third runway campaign is one of the seminal success stories of recent years. A coalition that encompassed local authorities, direct action groups, local resid-ents associations, and others, took on the entwined might of government and aviation industry and won a famous victory.
This booklet outlines the history of that campaign from its beginnings in 1997 to the decision in 2010 to scrap plans for a third runway. It explains the strategy and tactics that worked, the problems that arose and how they were overcome.
Author…
Asked days after the 11 September 2001 attacks if US president George W Bush’s “war on terror” was winnable, Noam Chomsky responded: “If we want to consider this question seriously, we should recognise that in much of the world the US is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and with good reason. We might bear in mind, for example, that in 1986 the US was condemned by the World Court for ‘unlawful use of force’ (international terrorism) and then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states (meaning the US) to adhere to…
The Three Trillion Dollar War is exhaustive analysis of the true cost of the war in Iraq. The headline figure – $3 trillion – is an unthinkable amount of money. Half of it, for example, would cover the cost of the United Nation’s eight Millennium Development Goals – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education by 2015.
But, Stiglitz and Bilmes point out, $3 trillion is a conservative estimate of the cost of the war to the US alone. Worldwide a minimum cost would…
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” It’s more than two years since the “great crash” of 2008. Henry Ford’s famous words are as pertinent as ever.
Apart from flashes of anger about bankers’ bonuses there has been no great social movement rising from the ashes of the financial system. Instead, the most articulate voices in response to the banking collapse have come from the political right, where…
Greg Muttitt’s first solo book follows on from joint projects with socio-environmental arts project Platform, taking on the oil industry, British foreign policy past and present, market dynamics, and the grassroots impact of big powers at play. With this book we see Muttitt shifting into top gear, drawing on the interdisciplinary analysis and corporate super-sleuthing he’s honed over the past 15 years with Platform and Corporate Watch (which he helped co-found) to navigate the neo-con, neo-imperial struggle over Iraq’s oil with fluency,…
“Peace without justice is hollow, a sham, the deathly stillness of tyranny triumphant,” writes Michael Riordon, as he shares his stories of Israelis and Palestinians resisting the occupation, all of whom have experienced harassment from the authorities, sometimes death threats and imprisonment.
The Israelis, immigrants or children of immigrants, all initially supported a Zionist state as a home for Jews, but gradually came to see Israel as a colonialist oppressor. Riordon, a Canadian, had a similar journey. At first subscribing to…
I suspect many activists struggle with the bigger political context outside their immediate areas of concern and engagement – I know I do. An insidious feature of current mainstream political culture is that sense of “this is how it is; this is the only way things can be”; that capitalism, of a neoliberal variety, is the only game in town. Hence for activists the choice can feel like either doing single-issue politics, or none at all. This book can change all that.
Moments of Excess is a relatively short book that packs in a…
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 best were the ones that were on the quirky side, the…
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At first I thought that Sober Living for the Revolution was about historical, successful “sober” anarchist collectives and how they organised. The first part of the title misled me. Then I read the rest of the title which went on as “Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics”. Second thoughts: “Oh no! Interviews with a bunch of straight-edgers!” To be honest, being into hardcore punk, I never got into the whole straight edge scene in the same way that Ian Mackaye didn’t (whose song the whole thing started from), because it always…
“Our South Africa moment has finally arrived,” is Omar Barghouti’s rallying call for a global BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement to support the struggle for human rights in Palestine. In this book he eloquently and persuasively sets out the arguments for BDS against Israel in order to end its oppression of the Palestinians that is in defiance of both UN resolutions and international law.
Academic and co-founder of BDS, Barghouti draws on the South African anti-apartheid movement to both describe Israeli oppression and to…
In 1986, documentary and fashion photographer Iain McKell was sent by the Observer to photograph the new age traveller “Peace Convoy” on its way to Stonehenge. A year earlier, the police had attacked the convoy in what has become known as “the Battle of the Beanfield”. It was, said an ITN journalist present, “the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career”.
In 2001, McKell revisited the new age traveller community to see how the subculture had developed since those tumultuous times. He fell in with…