Reviews

Imagine Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Nike as real people. This is how The Corporation – the latest political documentary to hit our cinema screens – begins. In taking a look at the psychological profile of a modern day corporation – its self-interested nature, its inability to feel guilt and its uncaring stance – the film reveals that our favourite brands fit precisely the medical definition of a psychopath. Unfortunately, as the documentary explains, under today’s laws, a corporation is a person. It has all the rights and freedoms of…

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…

Using a single entity or idea to tell a wider story has been a saleable strategy for popular historians since Longitude became such a resounding hit. People expecting something similar in Joe Sherman’s Gasp: the Swift and Terrible Beauty of the Air may well start out by being a little disappointed. Sherman is an excellent writer, and the book’s first half carries an impressive array of facts and anecdotes. However, their assembly is as formless as their subject. In this exploration of our dependency on this much-damaged basis for life, he…

This book, published in association with Médecins sans Frontiéres, lacks a precise focus, but is principally concerned with international responses to intranational conflict and the problems they pose to humanitarian organisations.

It begins with an excellent and incisive introduction by Jean-Hervé Bradol who outlines three basic types of international response: intervention, involvement and abstention. A large part of the book is dedicated to case studies illustrating each of these three basic types…

This offering from Peace Direct uses personal narratives to celebrate and give voice to a very different type of hero: individuals who have taken the frequently traumatic decision to reject the path of conflict in favour of the often more difficult but ultimately far more fulfilling route of active peace-making.

The subjects of these fifteen accounts would not characterise themselves as heroes, and it is this humility that gives the book much of its force. The stories are told with striking honesty; many of the contributors relate…

If ever there was a time for peace, it must surely be our troubled, traumatised own. And yet, if it were instigated, the fundamental question remains: who might benefit from this dreamt-of peace, and would any agreement resolve the underlying causes of conflict or merely satisfy the current global managers of economic and political power?

Given that this review is being written the day after 125 Iraqis were killed by US strikes in the Iraqi city of Samarra, while dozens died in shootings and bombings in India, the search for what we…

This useful summary and overview is part of a series of beginner's guides published by Oneworld. I'd like to see the others also - on Genetics, PalestineIsrael and particularly Postmodernism, a subject on which I shall always be a beginner.

Tormey presents a well-organised schematic look at the modern anti-capitalist movement in recent years. He believes that the last five years since WTO Seattle in 1999 calls for a redefinition of anti-capitalist movements - essentially the hopeful and forward-looking strategy that has developed…

Few novels are reviewed in Peace News, but then few novelists have the anti-war commitment of Maggie Helwig, a PN contributor, Woman in Black and former member of the WRI Council. This novel, however, is not an anti-war tract but an enthralling work of imagination that gains much of its power from Maggie's serious and multi-angled approach to the reality of war.

The story is set at the false turn of the millennium (remember the panic about y2k chaos?) when the journalistic circus has moved on from Bosnia leaving…

It was a pleasure to be given this to review - it's a book I'd want to buy if I could afford it.

Rex Weyler has written a history of a major part of this movement, assessing many of the personalities, and narrating some of the dramatic stories. (See interview p10-12.)

Lots of this has been told before, but this might be the first attempt to pull so much of this history together by someone so close to it. It is a pity it concentrates on the 1970s, though that means it gives a fascinating insight into the struggles to establish…

Otto Grunfeld was a teenager when he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration for the crime of being a Jew. He spent two years living in a Jewish ghetto in Czechoslovakia before being transported to Auschwitz and later to Kaufering. During that time all other members of his immediate family were killed.

It took him fifty years to find the strength and the distance to be able to write about his war experience and the result is a slip of a book - just 100 pages. The weight of its contents, though, packs the emotional punch of a…

I am a big APC and TooL fan, so when I heard the chaps were going to knock out a covers album I was a bit hesitant.

What if a band you really like starts churning out cheesy covers in a weird, referential, “we're all rock gods together” kind of way?

Well, no worries on that front: this album surpassed my expectations, both musically and politically, and has been played non-stop at the PN office for the past couple of weeks.

Running up to the US election APC announced the release of this compilation of tunes about “…

Donald Rooum's Wildcat cartoons have been published in Freedom Anarchist Fortnightly for longer than some Peace News readers have been tramping their ecological footprints over the planet. There are series of books available with titles such as the ABC of Bosses, Health Service Wildcat and Wildcat Strikes Again.

Rooum's work has many strengths - the clarity of the line drawings, the self-conscious and self-mocking use of stereotypes (the army general with handle-bar moustache, the porcine…

Most PN readers would, I hope, be at least aware of the issue of the “missing women” of India and China and the growing problem of gender imbalance in the populations of these two huge countries. The increasing use of sex-selective abortion as an apparently more socially acceptable option than female infanticide is the latest twist to this tale, the chilling use of modern medical technologies to eliminate socially and economically undesirable girl children.

As a woman and a feminist, I have always found these developments deeply…

This is a book which makes a very useful contribution to the literature which already exists about the use of atomic weapons against Japan.

Noritaka Fukami was in Nagasaki at the time that the bomb was dropped. After the bomb fell he was involved in some of the rescue work within the city. Storm Over Nagasaki is a scroll depicting the bombing, and provides a visual record of what he and others experienced at the time.

Suffering from radiation sickness, he committed suicide in 1952.

The book is divided into two main…

April 2004 marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide, making this publication both timely and important. It uncovers a side of that terrible story largely hidden from public view. Shake Hands with the Devil is an intensely personal account, written by the head of the UN mission before and during the slaughter.

Informed that he was being posted to Rwanda, Lt General Dallaire remembers that the only information he had about the country was a photocopied page from an encyclopaedia. As commander of UN…