Reviews

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Just over a year ago (PN 2497), we suggested there was a convergence of views of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X in their later years, in particular their growing convictions that overcoming class oppression was central to black liberation.

We quoted King in 1966: “something is wrong with capitalism… there must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move towards a Democratic Socialism”; and 1967: “capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves…. We must recognize that the problems of…

This book is not an easy read in any sense of the term and hardly anyone emerges from its pages with much credit. It lays bare, in great detail, the origins of the present conflict in Darfur and how it has unfolded in recent years. Needless to say, the true picture is considerably more complex than that presented by the mass media which, in any event, were somewhat late upon the scene.

“Until March 2004, Darfur’s crisis unfolded in the typical manner of African civil wars, unremarked in the world’s media, with horrific human…

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia and embarked on a four-year reign of terror and genocide. During this period, over 14,000 so-called “traitors” were processed through the secret prison S-21 set in a former school, with confessions extracted under torture. As part of the process, captives were photographed prior to execution.

S-27 is a play inspired by these real events. May’s job is to take the photographs. We follow her as she begins to question what she is doing, and her humanity begins to re-assert itself,…

Waging what one of his aides termed a “war on sleep”, Martin Luther King Jr spent the last months of his life trying to organise the Poor People’s Campaign: a new inter-racial, class-based movement among the poor, in which he hoped black preachers would play a key galvanising role.

Fighting insuperable odds to bring this vision to reality, King also found himself sucked into the struggle of striking sanitation workers in Memphis – and discovered that workers, ministers, unionists and civil rights leaders there had already forged the…

This amazing book is a political treatise, personal journal, lively commentary, an invaluable history and a guidebook to sustained activism, all in one volume. This is a work to be read and consulted for many years.

In 2005 activist Angie Zelter and her friends contemplated the weakening of the peace movement and its lack of energy. Instead of moaning and hand-wringing they created an ambitious plan to galvanise British activists. They came up with the idea to blockade Faslane in Scotland for 365 days with 100 blockaders at the gates…

Professor Peter Hennessy is a tremendously well-connected insider, who has over the years lifted the lid on Whitehall in a way that no other historian has managed. His latest book Cabinets and the Bomb is perhaps the ultimate in revelation, in that it reproduces (photographically) top secret cabinet documents relating to the most sensitive topic in British politics: the British nuclear arsenal.

62 documents from 1940 to 2007 are presented (often in full), along with explanatory text, a very useful 14-page chronology, and two brief…

“At last a book on conscientious objection to military service from the point of view of contemporary objectors. It expresses the critique objection poses to patriarchy and social militarization and firmly places objection in the context of struggle for social transformation” – that’s my enthusiastic and heartfelt endorsement on the back cover of this book.

It is absolutely genuine – and not just because I’m friendly with one of the editors and some of the contributors, or because I was appalled by a certain anthology that I couldn’…

This is a book about the way refugee academics have been either rescued by their British counterparts or received and treated on seeking asylum in the UK. In particular it focuses on the work of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) – originally formed in 1933 as the Academic Assistance Council.

The book is divided into three parts: “Then”, about the rescue of expelled or threatened (mainly Jewish) academics from Nazi Germany and neighbouring countries; “Until”, a short chapter about refugees from apartheid South Africa…

Written by three British-based scholars – a political scientist, a human geographer and a sociologist – Anti-War Activism is the first book-length academic analysis of the post 9/11 anti-war movement in the UK.

Focusing on six organisations – Stop the War Coalition, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Faslane 365, Muslim networks, the Quakers and Justice Not Vengeance – the study is based on 60 interviews with activists, including Peace News editor Milan Rai and columnist Maya Evans.

It includes a thorough exploration of a…

I liked the Transition books the moment I saw them – they are well-designed and produced, and look and feel great. In a way they mirror the Transition movement itself, rolling together a mass of related ideas into an attractive package that promises a way out of the looming dead end that is peak oil and climate change. So they look good and offer much, but do the books deliver? And can the Transition movement itself deliver on its promises?

The Handbook is split into three sections – described as “head”, “heart” and “hands” -…

Once you get past the introduction – which is poorly written and unfocused, with most of the important information repeated in the main body of the book – Long Time Passing is just what it says on the cover: a country by country breakdown of the effects of war and terror on mothers, families and society.

Each chapter – covering Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria and the US – starts with a well-referenced history of recent events that have briefly appeared in the media before the cameras moved on to the next horror…

In the foreword to Low Impact Development, long-time promoter Simon Fairlie favours a definition of the eponymous concept as “development which, by virtue of its low or benign environmental impact, may be allowed in locations where conventional development is not permitted.”

The book sets out by putting low impact development (LID) into context, stressing the urgent need for such environmentally-friendly housing to be considered as a mainstream approach: “LID has huge potential to deliver truly sustainable development.”

A…

In a society where only 3% of babies are exclusively breastfed at five months (Unicef 2005), breastfeeding can seem like a political act. Certainly where I live, it’s so unusual to see a woman breastfeeding that I can’t help doing a double-take when I see it.

Kate Evans – better known for her excellent cartoon books on the anti-roads movement, climate change and civil liberties – has produced a funny, subversive, supremely helpful and reassuring book for those who want to breastfeed but don’t necessarily find it all plain sailing (or…

In popular myth, the Second World War has been cast as the last just war. Since Hitler was an evil tyrant who murdered millions of Jewish people, Britain and America had no option but to fight him. Churchill and Roosevelt were towering heroes, who did everything they could to minimise the effects of war on civilians, in order to rescue Europe from oppression.

Human Smoke is a welcome debunking of this legend. In it, Nicholson Baker has put together an impressive account of the origins of the Second World War, tracing events from 1892…