This was my first encounter with Simone Weil, the French philosopher, teacher and political activist, and I found her mesmerising – a huge intellect and a huge conscience. She dealt with the challenge that knowing and understanding the world creates an obligation to be involved in it, to affect it, by hurling herself into the stream of life to an extent verging on madness.
Although frail and clumsy, Weil sought out gruelling work in factories and farms; she was a union organiser; she went to fight with the anarchists in the Spanish…
Daniel Pennac, who is a well-known writer in France, was a total failure at school up to the age of fourteen. In the first part of this book he describes his despair, both in vivid anecdotes and general comment. “My God,” he says at one point, “the loneliness of the dunce, ashamed of never being able to do what you are supposed to be doing.” He became an insolent class clown, a vandal and a thief.
His insolence was to some extent justified by the mockery of some of his teachers, but it was teachers who saved him – first the French…
Speaking at a public meeting in May 2008, Green Party leader and MP to be, Caroline Lucas noted that the language of fear and disaster surrounding climate change is both “deeply scary and deeply unhelpful.” According to Lucas “trying to terrify people into action” simply doesn’t work.
Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, doesn’t seem to have got the memo because Requiem for a Species is a deeply terrifying read.
According to Hamilton “catastrophic climate change is now virtually…
The PPU will be well-known to older readers of PN, but perhaps to others only because of the white “peace poppy”. What was once a mass movement supporting the pledge to “renounce war, and never again... [to] support or sanction another” became a small organisation, largely concerned with peace education.
Along the way the organisation faced challenges, losing members during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. The PPU opposed conscription, continuing this opposition into “peacetime”, while supporting individual…
One of the sessions at PN’s 2010 Summer Camp was entitled “Can we eat our way out of crisis?” “Is that a practical workshop?” one wag asked. Everyone laughed, but if Colin Tudge is right – and on certain fundamentals I suspect that he is – then perhaps it should have been.
A modest proposal
Though best-known for his rather wonderful science writing (recent books include a Secret Life of Trees and a book on the evolution and classification of birds) Tudge has also spent over three decades thinking and writing about farming.…
Though they need some unpacking, everything you need to know about what to eat can be boiled down to just seven words: “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This is the conclusion of journalist Michael Pollan after years researching nutritional science. His latest book does some of this unpacking, with 64 simple rules for eating healthily and happily.
Though not anti-science, Pollan has framed these in everyday language, noting that while science has confirmed much of what culture has long known about how to eat well, “it is…
Wobegone is the third solo album by former Chumbawamba member Danbert Nobacon. Chumbawamba were (indeed still are, in their current acoustic incarnation) unique in UK popular music in combining a radical anarchist analysis and action with a creative trajectory that showed the same integrity as their politics.
Never afraid to experiment, their music was, at times, hit-and-miss but some of it was astonishingly, ecstatically good – all the more impressive when you think of the band’s origins in early ’80s post-punk Britain when they…
The dogma of deterrence is now so deeply ingrained that the national corruption implicit in the willingness to murder the innocent is ignored. Robert Green dares to differ. For many years he was an aircraft bombardier who, if ordered, would have dropped a UK nuclear bomb near St Petersburg, causing “appallingly indiscriminate casualties and long-term poisonous effects from radioactive fallout” as well as destroying a beautiful ancient capital.
Luckily, he has seen the error of his ways. “I realised that nuclear weapons would not save…
“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 events of 31 May and detailed analysis of why…
With industrial civilisation destroying the planet, How Shall I Live my Life? is “the only question worth asking” according to the radical thinker Derrick Jensen. Thus the ten wide-ranging interviews with largely American activists, philosophers and writers conducted by Jensen centre on each person’s holistic methods of resistance to the environmental degradation caused by the dominant culture.
Reconnecting to the natural world, looking to indigenous cultures and increasing democracy are some of the common threads running through…
The book is not a guide to collectives, or facilitation, or consensus. It presumes a certain prior knowledge and experience of all of these, and is for those who want to understand, and better deal with, the problems and pitfalls of working within collective structures.
The authors’ use their first hand experience to look at the realities of power and personality dynamics in supposedly egalitarian groups. This includes things like manipulative and coercive behaviour (both in individuals and in the group), dealing with conflicts,…
As a child William Morris lived near Epping Forest, a place he would later describe as “always interesting and always beautiful”.
Kathy Haslam, curator of Blackwell and co-curator of this exhibition with Helen Elletson, curator of Kelmscott House, sees Morris’s sense of place as a thread running through his life and work. The exhibition tries to show how important place was to him. It looks at the successive places where he lived and worked and shows the logical development from his early love of nature and history, through his…
A recent edition to the New Internationalist’s “No-Nonsense” book series, Symon Hill’s short guide to religion is a readable introduction to an often controversial and misrepresented subject.
Hill, a Quaker Christian who is the co-director of the Ekklesia thinktank and former media spokesperson for Campaign Against the Arms Trade, argues: “For every example of a link between religion and oppression, there is a link between religion and liberation”.
To illustrate the former he includes a shocking quote from the Bishop of London…
The Nation, the United States’ leading left-liberal magazine, once said: “Not to have read Chomsky is to court genuine ignorance”. Rarely has this been more true than today.
With Hopes and Prospects, academic and activist Noam Chomsky has produced another indispensable critique, explaining the inner workings of world affairs.
The first half of the book is largely focused on Latin America, with updated and revised versions of lectures Chomsky gave in Chile and Venezuela in 2006 and 2008.
Chomsky points out that US state…
If you could choose any of the characters from your childhood reading, who would you invite to help you spark a revolution? James Bond? Harry Potter? Badger from The Wind and the Willows?
If you’re the central character in Paco Igancio Taibo’s tricksy novella – one of PM Press’s new “Found in Translation” series – you choose Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, D’Artagnan, Dick Turpin, the Light Brigade, and then throw in some Mau Mau fighters for good measure.
Set in the wake of the infamous October 1968 Tlatelolco massacre (in…