Reviews

Offering a singular take on recent US/UK strategies in the Middle East, A Letter to the Prime Minister follows international activist Jo Wilding on her remarkable journey of the last few years, in solidarity with the people of Iraq.

&nb

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

World leaders could benefit from this simple parable set in North India. “The transformation of a terrorist into a Buddha still inspires hope that even the terrorists today - whether stateless murderers on the run or leaders of governments - can face

Unbelievably Spanner Films have done the impossible. By putting what should already be a multi-award winning documentary on to DVD, they have made it even better.

McLibel tells the story of how a postman and a gardener

Many Peace News readers will have written polite(!) letters to their MPs and various ministers.

Usually a reply comes, written in mandarin, full of comforting phrases, often regretting that such and such a question could “only be answered at disproportionate cost”. A waste, perhaps, of time and postage, with no satisfaction. What if, though, you stopped being polite to the criminals who run the show? Kevin Wicker has found out, receiving a few anodyne replies and even fewer (im)proper counter-attacks.

Compilations of…

James Pettifer has written and spoken about the Balkans for the likes of The Times and Wall Street Journal for many years. This point is important to make from the start, because when he speaks or writes he does so with both clarity and authority, qualities that many other commentators who deal with the region do not have.

The Balkans are not the most straightforward part of the world, as anyone who follows affairs there knows, and so it is an enormous pleasure to at last be able to read Pettifer's account of the years he spent…

Suicide in Palestine: Narratives of Despair is the first book to deal with the increase in suicide among ordinary Palestinians living under occupation.

It is not about so-called suicide bombers, although this phenomenon is also examined by way of contrast. This work is about individuals in the general population, and the various circumstances which lead them to become depressed and, in greater numbers than in the past, commit suicide. This is what the author Dr Nadia Dabbagh refers to as the “ripple effects of war”.

Dabbagh…

This collection of essays and speeches by India's award winning writer ranges across the world on many important issues from globalisation to AIDS.

Roy's acceptance speech for the USA Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom urges her US audience to remember their history of brave resistance. She speaks as “a subject of the American Empire” when she says the change has to begin in America. She calls on its citizens and says, “The only institution more powerful than the US government is American civil society.”

In “When the Saints Go…

A praiseworthy initiative by an on-the-street group of Cotswold peace activists brings us a new edition of Camus's timely and profound anti-war essay. A world famous French essayist and playwright, Camus first contributed his assessment of the world outlook in 1946 to the Parisian resistance newspaper, Combat, to which he had been an underground contributor during the Nazi occupation.

The New York magazine Liberation, the foremost US advocate of nonviolence during the Martin Luther King era, published a translation…

Chechnya is a war that was never especially popular in the West. Such is the paucity of news coming out of that destroyed place that those who may once have been aware of the violence there could be forgiven for thinking that it is over.

Since 2001, when Putin was welcomed by America as a valuable ally in the “war on terror”, it seems we are told that anything that happens in Chechnya is just a part of this struggle against those set on destroying our way of life. The only time that Chechens are newsworthy is during shocking events…

This volume sets out to demonstrate that we are now living in what the editors refer to as a “new age of Empire”, which the book argues began with wars of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of being the start of a world in which global co-operation ensures advancement and prosperity for all people, globalisation is actually responsible for the increased instability that threatens ever-greater numbers of people.

A collection of original and rigorous pieces by nine prominent opponents of globalisation from five continents,…

The British literary scene is pretty infatuated with English language writing by Indians and the Asian diaspora. Figures such as Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie are established icons, and newer names like Monica Ali have massive sales. Black British writers of Afro-Caribbean descent are also widely known, despite the discrimination they still face in getting published.

With one or two prominent exceptions, such as Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka, African writers are much less widely known in the UK. This compilation of poetry and…

This multifunction CD from the Peace Pledge Union uses a browser based system for navigating through the material.

Contents are divided into nine sections, including: quotations; racialism; war and peace; civil disobedience; the movement & black power; violence & nonviolence.

The disc also includes sources and a comment on the famous “I have a dream” speech and lists books by and about King. It also offers speeches - in print and with some video and audio extracts - plus teaching and study resources.

Finally,…

Our wondrous Western Civilisation, with its self-image of progress, rationality and human rights has, over the last hundred years, become a brutal glutton for oil. This much should be obvious to everyone. What isn't so obvious - but is made so in this short and punchy booklet produced by three campaigning groups - is the price paid by western workers, citizens of Majority World countries and the biosphere itself.

It moves swiftly (two pages per topic) through oil and conflict, repressive regimes, oil and development (“The Midas…

In one of many memorable scenes in his new book, Christian Parenti asks a doctor in Ramadi, Iraq, whether he sees many children with symptoms related to possible radiation poisoning – a potential legacy of depleted-uranium weapons used by US forces in 1991 and 2004. “I cannot answer,” the doctor replies. “Why not?” Parenti asks. After a long pause the doctor finally offers a coded apology: “This is the freedom,” he explains. “Ah, the freedom … [w]e have the gas-line freedom, the looting freedom, the killing freedom, the rape freedom … I don…