Reviews

Based on over 200 personal testimonies from the Imperial War Museum’s oral history collection, Voices Against War is a fascinating and lively survey of anti-war protest in the UK from 1914 to the present day.

A university lecturer and author of the bestselling Young Voices, Lyn Smith is keen to stress the complexity and range of anti-war positions held by those who have resisted their Government’s call to go to war. For example, in the first world war conscientious objectors (COs) fell into two broad categories – “absolutists” who…

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 and chatty thoughts.

I think McIntosh would…

On 24 October, Lance Corporal Joe Glenton made headlines by being the first serving British soldier to take part in an anti-war demonstration. Glenton’s courageous stand against the unpopular war in Afghanistan is certainly welcome, but, as Dahr Jamail highlights in The Will to Resist, the UK trails far behind the US when it comes to resistance among the armed forces to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A US journalist who has reported from Iraq on the devastation wreaked upon the civilian population by US forces, Jamail has…

In 2001 legendary non-fiction cartoonist Joe Sacco travelled to Gaza on an assignment for Harper’s magazine to report on the fate of Palestinians in the town of Khan Younis during the second Intifada.

That visit prompted him to follow up a reference he’d read many years earlier in Noam Chomsky’s book The Fateful Triangle: a short quote from a UN document concerning a massacre in the town during the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which scores of unarmed men were shot in their homes or lined-up against walls by Israeli forces.

Though…

Pablo Picasso’s painting, Guernica, was shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1939 as a consciousness- and fund-raiser for the Spanish Republican cause.

Today it is back again, in tapestry form, as the seed for Goshka Macuga’s exploration of a web of connections: from a 1939 viewing “fee” of a pair of worker’s boots to the image, now hung in the UN building, being covered up during Colin Powell’s pre-war on Iraq speech. Goshka intervenes in history to give us Colin Powell – a bronze bust – and his speech in front of Guernica. She…

Tripp York has tried to remove the academic discourse from his dusted-off master’s essay to turn it into a readable book. This means the book is now short enough to read in one sitting, but limits both the breadth of discovery and the ability to argue a point.

However, York’s definition of Christian anarchism is carefully explained and argued and as good as any one might read from Vernard Eller (a member of the Church of the Brethren and author of Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy Over the Powers (1987)) or Jacques Ellul (French…

Imagine a radical activist going through pretty much the entire publicly-available English-language literature on how to do soldiering (how to train a ground-hugging grunt), and also digesting quite a lot of the open literature on police forensics and government surveillance techniques – in order to extract the stuff that would be (or could be) useful for activists wanting to break into places and stop dastardly deeds.

Bumping Back is pretty much the result. Two randomly-selected sentences give a flavour: “Knowledge of the following…

This inspiring book draws on the practical experience of Transition Initiatives and provides all the information and inspiration needed to start a local food project. “It’s all about devising abundant, beautiful, fun and delicious food projects.”

The main part of the book is made up of all the different categories of local food projects from shared allotment and garden projects through Community Supported Agriculture Schemes to food co-operatives and school projects. Each one is presented as a “story” with helpful tips from project…

Since setting up the Media Lens website (www.medialens.org) in 2002, David Edwards and David Cromwell have been publishing regular media alerts “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”, encouraging readers to write directly to individual journalists to take them to task.

Largely made up of edited versions of these alerts, Newspeak in the 21st Century’s central thesis is that there is “a profound, consistent bias favouring powerful interests stretching right across the media…

These two books offer criticisms of capitalism from very different perspectives.

Shutt, a left-leaning economist, argues that the ongoing crisis within capitalism has arisen from the growing redundancy of capital since the 1970s. With too much capital sloshing around, the rich have found it increasingly hard to find investments that can deliver the profits they expect, resorting to taking high risks that make the whole edifice increasingly fragile.

Shutt attacks the laissez-faire prospectus, showing that state power and…

This installation by the young, internationally-acclaimed Jerusalem-born Fast presents an original and often disturbing insight into the plight of asylum seekers and their struggle to be heard.

One film depicts an asylum seeker from a dystopian Britain seeking asylum in Africa. The preceding two films show, respectively, a dramatised interview between the artist and an asylum seeker in London, and a brief piece of original footage.

The films are five, 10 and 30 minutes in length, beginning with the shortest, and are presented…

As a young South African lawyer, Albie Sachs defended his clients on charges brought under apartheid laws, was detained and tortured with sleep deprivation, went into exile, and lost an arm and an eye when South African security agents put a bomb in his car.

Following the end of apartheid, Sachs was appointed to the constitutional court by Nelson Mandela. This book is the fascinating story of an activist and lawyer given the opportunities, first to help write his country’s new constitution and then, as a judge on the constitutional…

Between the summer of 1918 and the following spring about 230,000 people died in Britain from a deadly strain of influenza, popularly called Spanish Flu. The toll worldwide may have been as high as 100 million. This book describes the pandemic in Britain making use of unpublished testimonies of survivors and the memoirs of doctors, soldiers, and civil servants.

The title comes from a rhyme sung by children at the time: “I had a little bird / Its name was Enza / I opened the window / And in-flu-enza”. One theme of the book is that…

In 2004 a group of fundamentalist Christians sitting on a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, voted to make their students “aware of… other theories of evolution, including, but not limited to, intelligent design” – creationism’s latest Trojan horse.

Eleven committed parents – including a Girl Scout leader, a devout Catholic and a physics teacher who taught summer Bible school – decided to take a stand, and sued the board for violation of their first amendment rights (“separation of church and state”), whilst simultaneously mounting…

This Handbook has been put together by an international committee with the aim of creating a useful tool for those working for social change. However, unlike many similar books birthed in British or North American activist movements, this one is written from a global perspective and is all the richer for it, providing a broader view of both how nonviolent actions can be used and the type of people who are involved in such activism.

Written in a clear and succinct style, it’s a worthwhile read for all those involved in nonviolent…