Reviews

Katharine von Schubert's book tells the story of a period of a year and half, when this young woman joined Quaker Peace and Social Witness's human rights observation programme in the West Bank. As such, I approached it with some trepidation. In the last few years, a number of volumes have emerged recounting the experiences of international activists in Palestine, from the International Solidarity Movement, Christian Peacemaker Teams and a range of other groups. Some have been very good, and offered genuine insights into the situation in…

Spirited Living is an essay written from the 2004 Swarthmore Lecture in which Simon Fisher, an experienced peace worker, lends a personal viewpoint to a call for Quakers to become more actively involved in peace activism or conflict transformation.

From the first chapter, the current status of the overall Quaker movement is challenged. It is represented as a somewhat confused and benign force in the global peace movement. The brief history of the Quakers given, including some of the courageous and successful peace-work…

People who want to change the world must buy this book.

Avian influenza, or “bird flu”, is going to change the world, and affect every struggle we are involved in, from global trade to the war in Iraq, via the world economy, immigration and animal rights. Mike Davis has put together a dense, readable book setting out the nature of the problem, and the deeper roots of the crisis in the present world system - in intensive agro-industry, dispossessed Third World slums, and corporate greed.

This is what the well-informed radical…

Margaret Legum has written a good and interesting book, but not the one she set out to write.

Part of the problem is that the book emerged from a set of lectures given at a University of Capetown Summer School. There is therefore an expectation that the reader already has a relatively clear understanding of the social and ecological costs of unfettered capitalism. While this is true for South Africa, other parts of the world still have a (diminishing) cushion of illusion. I fear that the density of her prose (suited to speaking, not…

One Voice is a compilation of two pieces by the renowned pacifist Vera Brittain, written during World War II. The first, Humiliation with Honour, is a reproduction of a series of letters from mother to son. The second, Seeds of Chaos, provides detailed and gruelling evidence of the human and cultural destruction stemming from the “obliteration bombing” policy adopted by the RAF in the 1940s. A foreword by her daughter, Shirley Williams, and introduction by Y Aleksandra Bennett give context to the two works.

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White Rose was the name of a student group in Munich that was engaged in the production of clandestine publications - leaflets that stated that the Nazi dictatorship were losing the war, and showed that it was totally futile to continue the conflict, especially after the horrific loss of German lives at Stalingrad.

The film concentrates on Sophie Scholl and, to a much lesser extent, her brother Hans, who were both leading figures within White Rose. It covers what happened to the pair of them during just a short period in February…

The first time I saw this film must have been shortly after it was released some 35 years ago. I felt that what was being described within this pseudo-documentary could happen to both me and my mates - really scary!

I remember it as a film which had a greater shock value to me than the more famous Watkins film The War Game, and even after all of these years I still feel that it is a stronger and much more shocking movie. The film is set in the America of the not-too-distant future in which martial law has been imposed. Dissidents…

This little book excites me more than the whole heavy stack that I recently received to review. It is immediate, politically and socially relevant, practical and comprehensive - we need it. Small-scale water power, that is.

The price of petroleum increases as reserves dwindle. Wars and coups are planned and executed to ensure the minority world gets what it considers “our oil”, no matter where it is. And those who complain about polluting coal based energy, also from a non renewal resource, are told the answer is nuclear. In much of…

Devi Prasad's history of War Resisters' International covers the first fifty-plus years of its existence from 1921 to 1973-4.

Based on the records of statements from its Council and Executive and the proceedings and resolutions of its International Triennial Conferences and Study conferences, the book traces its development from an essentially anti-militarist and anti-conscription organisation to one with the broader agenda of promoting nonviolent direct action on a range of issues, though with the anti-militarist commitment still…

This Guide is easy to understand and provides a good introduction to the steadily growing and varied fields of ethical careers. The articles and profiles cover the public and private sectors as well as voluntary work, and advice is given not only on how to get involved in the more obviously ethical careers such as environmental consultants and community workers, but introducing the growing opportunities offered as more and more companies, even “evil multinationals”, create corporate responsibility departments.

Although the cover and…

I stumbled across this book in the early nineties after listening to the track of the same name, on Consolidated's album Friendly Fascism, in which Adams reads passages from her book.

Having lived in a women-only non-meat-eating community, the ideas expressed in this book - linking the objectification of women and non-human animals - were not exactly news, however the uncompromising delivery, the musical collaboration, and the use of historical literature through which to explore the issues were.

Stark messages such as: "Meat…

To us who were around at its beginning, it may be as shock to realise that CND is approaching its 50th birthday in 2008. A new review of its progress and achievements is therefore timely.

Kate Hudson, Chair of CND, took on a daunting task, and it is not surprising that more attention is given to the dramatic developments of the past 25 years than to the earlier ones - though that is no bad thing given the errors and omissions in the earlier history.

Kate does not actually mention, for example, that when a revival of the March…

The back-cover blurb describes this book as "superbly accessible" - a phrase I greet with caution as it usually indicates a subject the publishers don't actually expect their readers to understand.

This time, however, it is the author's background rather than her subject which caused the publicity department to pull out the reassuring language. Alison Hills is a philosophy lecturer, so her book debates the status of animals against a formal framework of moral ethics.

As promised, the arguments for and against granting "rights…

This is a piece of academic research geared towards producing an internationally acceptable methodology for assessing the effects of the arms trade on sustainable development in developing countries.

Its aim is to persuade all arms exporting countries (mainly in the "first" world) to apply sustainability criteria to all applications for arms export licences. It is not, therefore, against the arms trade per se, but neither does it confine itself to the banning of arms sales to repressive regimes.

The main thrust of its concern…

Despite the subtitle, this is not “The story of Britain's biggest mass movement”. There are brief inspiring accounts scattered throughout and some wonderful poems and posters, but these are in the margins, drowned in a sea of analysis and national pol