Reviews

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…

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…

Ten Tiny Toes looks at the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the families who have sons and daughters serving there.

Like every mother, Gill wants the best for her sons. Raise them well, keep them safe, clean and out of trouble. But for Michael and Chris the choices are few and far between. The only way to have the best and be the best is to join the army.

The play opens with a montage of news footage on a screen that forms the whole of the backdrop to the stage. Tony Blair tells us that Saddam Hussein has weapons…

Hundreds of thousands of people in the world engage in nonviolent struggle. Be it a labour strike, a boycott of a business, or an attempt to overthrow an oppressive state, people are practicing nonviolent methods to resolve their disputes. Considering the extent to which the technique is used, it is surprising how little literature exists to help activists to go about their campaigns.

Few have done more to help demystify nonviolent action and make it a practicable activity than Gene Sharp. Sharp has spent the last 50 years bringing a…

Movements need people who can think big. It would be hard to find someone who thinks bigger than Michael Albert, co-founder of South End Press, Z Magazine and ZNet, the sprawling online home of global radicalism.

Remembering Tomorrow is a memoir (mainly of Sixties activism on-and-off campus – at MIT); a manifesto (for Michael Albert’s intriguing brand of anarchism – though he prefers the term “participatory economy” or “parecon”); and a thoughtful reflection on actions, initiatives and influences.

For the general reader, there…

I heard David Ferrard sing in April at the launch of the Festival of Nonviolence and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

In the very simplest manner of music appreciation, hearing a voice that can touch, with great finesse and sweetness, one’s body is a strange wonder.

This collection has the current wars weaving their way through a series of love songs.

There is the subtle story of a Chechen refugee drawn to England by the music coming from his pocket radio, and falling in love with his language teacher in a…

Lucy Edkins’ paintings are naked, painful suffering images of our fellow men.

They are hanging high up on the walls of Housmans Bookshop – in traditional art jargon they have been “skied” by the primacy of books. But this very inaccessibility that me think of church paintings and then of mediaeval images of “The Passion”.

Lucy Edkins has created a series of paintings of Guantanamo, of men crouching and twisting from their torturers; flinching from the soldiers with their guns and dogs and boots; accusing the British and…

Imagine travelling the world in your dreams, navigating your way through its war zones with a set of dream maps – maps with some of the traditions of Western cartography, indications of lines of longitude and latitude, perhaps the outlines of countries – as well as beautiful colours rising off the land.

Bomb after Bomb is an atlas of places the United States has bombed, stretching from 19th century Nicaragua to 21st century Iraq, using hypnotically beautiful paintings by US artist elin O’Hara slavick that fuse the bomber’s eye view,…

”We would hardly be notorious characters if they had left us alone in the streets of Chicago last year.”
So said Tom Hayden

Flying Close to the Sun tells how Cathy Wilkerson transformed herself from a nice middle class girl to a violent revolutionary. Describing how she became involved in left-wing politics as a student, the book charts her developing understanding of the political issues of the 1960s and ’70s and how she begins to see violence as a possible tool to respond to injustice.

Wilkerson is at her best when she describes the debates around the formation of the Weather Underground and the strategies they begin to evolve. She is painfully honest…

There are at least three hundred thousand widows in Baghdad alone, and a further one million throughout Iraq, with their numbers rising daily. City of Widows is a timely reminder of the continuing calamitous affect of the Iraq war, particularly on Iraqi women. It interweaves Zangana's personal story of resistance, imprisonment and torture under Saddam Hussein with a history of Iraq from the early twentieth century to the present day.

The promotion of women's rights was given as a justification for the US/UK invasion, and Iraqi women…

Informed Choice? - which created a considerable stir in the media when it was released earlier this year - is essential reading for anyone with an interest in any aspect of the armed forces recruitment practice and how they treat their personnel.

Clear and comprehensive, Gee documents how recruitment literature emphasises the attractive aspects of military life, while glossing over the restrictions, risks and possible psychological pitfalls - with the word “kill” being notable by its absence.

For example, in Camouflage…

Man-made climate change is scientific fact, but consensus about its social meaning is still a way off. Why are we doing so little about it? Can resource use be uncoupled from quality of life? Is humanity's desire to consume really stronger than its desire to survive?

This activist-academic initiative is welcome, though parts of it are idealistic, polemical and woolly. The editors propose unspecified radical change in response to global warming and do not try to engage with liberal sceptics who believe a suitably incentivised…

The War on Terror game is an enjoyable board game about terrorists, governments, evil empires and people fighting for freedom.

It's a cross between Risk and Settlers of Catan. Risk is a game where the purpose is world conquest, and Settlers of Catan is a brilliant game where you use the resources of the land you are on, such as wool, wood, ore etc to build roads, towns, cities. Settlers is all about trading the resources you have access to with other players for ones that you don't have access to.

I have played War on Terror…

There are different ways of criticising the media. One method has just been demonstrated by Nick Davies, Guardian journalist, in his recent book Flat Earth News, which has received a mostly favourable reception in the industry that he excoriates.

There are three broad approaches to media criticism: conspiracy theory, internal debate and institutional critique.

The conspiracy theory accuses certain powerful individuals of acting outside their institutional roles for some nefarious purpose. Thus it would be a…