Reviews

The title of this book, and the reputation of its author, suggests it could be a welcome addition to a peace activist’s bookshelf. However for anyone interested specifically in pacifism, rather than just peace, it is a profoundly annoying and disappointing book. Perhaps the stark use of a nuclear disarmament symbol on the cover, when much of the book is nothing to do with nuclear weapons specifically, should have been a warning of the muddle inside.

Another clue – for people who approach a book like this by starting with a brief…

Between May and December of 1961 nearly 60 Freedom Rides took place across the southern states of America. The Riders came from a variety of backgrounds and crossed age, gender, race, geographical, professional, religious and political boundaries.

Their aim was to challenge in a nonviolent way the state laws which segregated blacks and whites in the transport systems of the southern states. Riders travelled side by side on interstate buses, defied segregation laws in the public facilities in the bus stations they travelled through,…

To mark his eightieth birthday The New Press have published a new selection of Noam Chomsky’s political and linguistic writings (The Essential Chomsky).

While some of the selections (which span almost five decades) would have to be included in any essential collection - the famous demolition of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour, or his reflections on the 1967 march on the Pentagon, where he was arrested for civil disobedience – there are also some surprising omissions, eg. his brilliant, epic essay on the Spanish Civil War, as…

Last year, an intelligent and committed activist confessed to me that they did not really understand what “capitalism” meant. More recently, another friend bemoaned to me the high level of coverage given over to the current financial crisis in the papers – not for lack of appreciation of the subject’s importance, but because most of the coverage was either unintelligible or uninformative.

Fortunately, help is now on hand for both of them. Well-structured, straightforwardly written, and leavened with apposite quotes, shocking…

On 31 January 2003, Katharine Gun, a 28-year old translator of Mandarin at Government Communication Headquarters in Cheltenham, arrived at work to find she had been copied in to an email from Frank Koza at the American National Security Agency.

With the US and UK facing stiff opposition at the United Nations to its aggressive stance on Iraq, the email explained how the American and British intelligence agencies were mounting a “dirty tricks” operation at the Security Council in an attempt to gain support for an invasion.

…

As a physicist myself (though of an altogether lowlier and grubbier variety), Oppenheimer’s story has always interested me.

How did a left-leaning, New York Jewish intellectual end up leading the Manhattan Project (the Second World War effort to develop the first nuclear weapons at Los Alamos in New Mexico), only to be crushed by the political system that he had served so well, in a much-publicised 1954 hearing which ended up withdrawing his security clearance? This book tells the story in its full complexity for the first time, and…

One of Tariq Ali’s identities (activist, novelist, broadcaster and so on) is participant-observer of his native Pakistan.

The Duel is a highly timely, well-informed, readable, sometimes-not-very-chronological study of Pakistan’s political evolution. Peace activists will probably skip straight to chapters eight and nine, dealing with US influence on Pakistan (heavy), and recent Afghan-Pakistani interactions (mutually destabilising). There is a lot of interesting material here, but not as many references to follow up or verify as there…

In history, women who failed to adopt traditional gendered roles have been characterised as “the bad, the mad and the good”. Similarly, narratives of mothers, monsters and whores are used to deny the agency of women who confound the stereotypes of passive victims of war or non-violent peace women, and who act with violence in the context of war or armed conflict.

These narratives have their roots in western myths: Medea, the vengeful mother, who killed all of her children; the beautiful, fearsome Medusa who turned men into stone;…

Mike Marqusee has an amazing story to tell in If I Am Not For Myself. Although the book follows his own journey through life, it reaches well beyond this and becomes a fascinating hybrid of family autobiography and detailed history of the Jewish left during the 20th century. The book traces the threads of leftist radical thought and Zionism through three generations of his family.

As a young adult, Marqusee’s anti-Zionism put him at odds with his family and many other Jewish Americans. Marqusee illustrates how his views were a…

Jonathan Cook is a journalist of rare commitment and integrity. In 2001 he left his job as a staff-writer at The Guardian to work freelance from the Arab majority city of Nazareth in Israel, in the belief that such independence from the mainstream papers, coupled with geographical proximity, would allow him to more freely evaluate and reflect on both the Israel-Palestine conflict and the wider problems of the Middle East. This book is a shining example of this newfound freedom.

Short but wide-ranging in its analysis, it focuses on…

This book is a must for anyone interested in deepening his or her understanding of civil (nonviolent) resistance both in general and in the particular context of the first Palestinian Intifada.

That Intifada – literally “shaking off” – began in response to the death in December 1987 of four Palestinians at an Israeli checkpoint. However, as Mary King shows in this meticulously researched study, the groundwork was laid by the development of civil society organisations, including notably women’s organisations, during the 1970s and…

Afghan Women: Identity & Invasion is an important book that challenges prevailing stereotypes and misconceptions widespread even amongst many progressive peace and anti-war activists.

The academic and activist Elaheh Rostami-Povey shows how Afghani women, far from being just passive victims, have been historically struggling to improve their rights and every-day living conditions, even under the rule of the Taliban.

The focus of the book, however, is on the impact of the recent US-led invasion. Rather than having liberated…

118 Days celebrates the “explosion of goodness” that arose from the kidnapping of four peace activists in Baghdad on 26 November 2005.

In 22 articles by 24 different authors, the book explores how this terrible event touched so many people in positive ways – from increased cooperation between peace and faith groups in Britain, to demonstrations of solidarity in the West Bank, and from discussions on the value of self-sacrifice in a US penitentiary to the media frenzy in the UK, the book explores how all these threads – of global and…

Kate Evans’ Thank you Greenham (Laughing Moon Press; 2008;ISBN 978-0956006103; 100pp; £7) is an account of her visits to Greenham in the early ’80s, with a particular stress on “how difficult it was to be a part-time activist”.

Interesting, it’s often hard to read: it’s a very honest account, brutally so at times. The experience seems to have damaged the author emotionally, yet she still manages to make the book a positive read, looking at Greenham as part of a wider struggle against oppression and war.

Finally, if you don’t…

In his 1961 farewell address to the nation, president Eisenhower warned that the US “must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex.”

In this book investigative journalist Solomon Hughes updates Eisenhower’s advice for the 21st century, noting that we now face an increasingly powerful “security-industrial complex”.

Since 9/11, Hughes argues, private companies have played a growing role in the “war on terror”. Through extensive lobbying and intimate links with the UK and US…