Reviews

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This summer, long-time US peace campaigner/researcher Joe Gerson is visiting the UK for a speaker tour to launch his brilliant new book Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World.

Joe Gerson documents operational planning for the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean war, the Vietnam war (early French phase as well as the later US debacle), and later.
Empire and the Bomb records the use of US nuclear threats during the Suez crisis (1956), the Lebanon and Iraq…

“... time was not a single river but something always branching into every possible outcome; time was a tree growing at infinite speed to produce infinite branches, so that there were many pasts and more presents and this very moment is begetting many futures.”
Rebecca Solnit, writing about the Merced River, Yosemite, USA

Place: London, Tate Britain and Parliament Square; Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran... centres of power and then where power acts; centres of resistance... Time: 2001; 2006; 2007; the long clock of injustice and its…

I had two misgivings about this book before I began to read it. Both turned out to be unfounded.

The first was that, since I have read my fair share of nonviolence books, I feared that it would all be repetition. Cortright starts the book with Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but not with the ordinary biographical stories of their lives. Rather he uses them as vehicles to explain the secret of non-violence, together with today's scholars and his own opinions. It works very well and even though Gandhi and King are familiar to…

It is a pity that books such as Blood Money have to be written. However, as long as such national hubris exists to prompt the current level of almost unimaginable mismanagement that is prevalent in Iraq today, then it as well that such misdeeds are put under the harshest, most thorough possible, public scrutiny. Any reader of this book should also be grateful that it is written by as competent and thorough an investigative journalist as Christian Miller, a Los Angeles Times staffer.

If there is one thing that makes this…

During my years of work in the international and local anti-apartheid movements and my pursuit of poetry that speaks to political reality, I discovered Brutus's poetry and heard of his activism. But I knew few details of his life and work. This book of memoirs, speeches, interviews and poetry is an excellent account of Dennis Brutus, and informed my admiration of his courage, commitment and perseverance.

Classified as “coloured” by the South African government, Brutus's parents were schoolteachers and they instilled a love…

In These Strange Criminals, Peter Brock collects stories of imprisoned conscientious objectors since the First World War, and - with one exception - from the English speaking world; Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA. While at times repetitive - but that's the nature of prison life - the different stories manage to capture the experience of imprisoned COs, their thinking, and also the changes to prison over the course of 50 years.

Brock chose prison memoirs from a wide range of objectors - religious and political -…

In Heat, George Monbiot attempts to construct what too few thinkers have attempted until now - a solution to climate change.

Refreshingly, he spends little time on the problem itself, declaring (correctly) that the debate on the science is over. Rather, the question is how we now deal with the greatest threat faced by humankind. Pointing out that current scientific estimates predict that the UK will need to cut its CO2 emissions by around 90% by 2030 - a far greater cut than planned for by the Labour government - Monbiot…

The main aim of this book, as its editors make clear at the outset, is to provide a collection of readings on the ethics of war that will “prove useful to many students, teachers and researchers”. What they have produced is likely to prove an invaluable resource for many readers for years to come.

The book has a variety of strengths. First, there is its sheer size, with nearly 700 pages of readings. The editors have not stinted on the index, which itself runs to nearly 40 pages, and helps the materials contained within the book to…

“Peggy [his mother] became a flame of optimism in my young life [during WW2]. And when I once asked what was the point of struggling with my homework when we were all going to die, she replied: “By the time you grow up, they may have found a cure for that ...” “She asked me repeatedly [during the Israeli siege of Lebanon in 1982] why governments spend so much money on guns.” (p793.)

For nearly thirty years, Fisk has been a journalist in the Middle East - through peace, war and politics - observing and writing for the…

In October 2005, Maya Evans was arrested for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq during a remembrance ceremony at the Cenotaph on Whitehall. She was charged with taking part in an “unauthorised demonstration” in a “designated area” under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA) and on 7 December 2005 she became the first person to be convicted under this Act.

The case attracted huge attention in the mainstream media as well as being closely followed by activists across the country,…

With this manifesto, Gorbachev adds his voice to the growing roar of those calling for universal and lasting social justice, and does so in a manner that is both diplomatic and urgent. He describes with passion how poverty, environmental destruction and war are the inseparable consequences of endemic political failure, and laments the opportunity squandered by consecutive US governments to implement a new era of peace and disarmament following the end of the Cold War.

He finds rampant consumerism, a lack of democratic accountability…

At the end of the 18th century well over three-quarters of humanity lived in bondage of one form or another, in a world in which, in the words of one historian, “freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution”. This amazing book - packed full of unforgettable heroes and villains - tells the story of the pivotal role played by popular campaigning in the termination of two of the worst manifestations of this global system: the British slave trade and Britain's West Indian slave plantations.

Assembling in 1787, British…

Worlds Apart is a comparison of the dual worlds of formal and non-formal (or democratic) education. As the publisher's name implies, the book is written by a supporter of free education but it cannot be accused of being overly partisan in its approach. It seeks, rather, to cut through prejudice on both sides and to provide information through the words of the schools and the pupils themselves. It would be fair to say that positive and negative aspects come out of both accounts although the balance comes down in favour of the liberal…

Having made a living out of ridiculing the evil antics of arms companies and other corporate criminals in his stand-up shows and on national television, Mark Thomas has finally got round to writing his first book.

Unsurprisingly, the butt of his written jokes is of course the arms trade. Well, the arms trade, the government, fellow activists and anyone else he cares to point the finger at. Starting with a good old rant about “why the reader should care about the arms trade”, it's clear that the book is not aimed at well informed die…