Reviews

I reviewed this book with the help of a group of 11-14-year-old girls and a sense of trepidation: how well would this group of children take to playing games that involved no competition or eventual winner?

The tag games worked very well, the girls enjoying the time to run and chase. The games that involved the girls putting themselves at risk of capture to help out others (Help-me Tag, Clam-Free Tag) helped highlight the girls who were easily willing to take the risk for friends and those who needed to have this encouraged in them…

With the classical meaning of a “diplomat is one who listens and reads twice”, I've been diplomatic with this book and diplomacy has paid.

I underestimated the book when I first read it and appreciated it better after going through it twice. Initially I was put off by some inaccuracies of fact and deficiencies of judgement when referring to Colombian history. Soon I came to value the usefulness of the overviews mainly for non-Colombian readers and the ability of the book to fulfil its own title.

A chapter on The Roots of…

In this book, Danilo Zolo offers “an interpretation of the `humanitarian war' waged by nineteen NATO countries against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999”. In so doing, he paints a depressing (but perhaps unsurprising) picture of political manoeuvrings, hypocrisy and double-dealings that are enough to get the word “humanitarian” a bad name. The fact that it takes place against the background of the genuine suffering of the people of Kosova serves only to make it all even worse.

At the heart of Zolo's analysis…

Nira Yuval-Davis' Gender and Nation is presented by the author as the culmination of her work in the areas of gender and ethnic studies beginning with her work in the 1980s on gender relations in Israel and the ways they have related to the Zionist settlement project and the Israeli-Arab conflict through to the Women, Citizenship and Difference conference at the University of Greenwich in 1996.

The book is organized in six chapters ("Theorising Gender and Nation"; "Women and the Biological Reproduction of the Nation"; 'Cultural…

The wild and warlike - and mostly illiterate - Muslim tribesmen known usually as Pathans, who straddled the barren mountains between Afghanistan and British India, were an unlikely source for a nonviolent movement. The story of the movement's intrepid leader, six-foot-three Badshah Khan (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan) and his redshirted Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) has been told a number of times.

Unlike previous writers Mukulika Banerjee, while recognising the contribution of it charismatic leader to the movement…

Few writers can take two seemingly different subjects like river dams and the war on terrorism and turn them into a coherent, informed, impassioned indictment of the nation state, elitist greed and militarised globalisation. Arundhati Roy can, and does.

India is a country where 70% of the population has no electricity and where more than the total population of Canada might be displaced and made homeless from their villages and farms by dam building. I say might because as Roy states, nobody really knows, as the supposedly…

This is a special issue of the ground-breaking anti-racist and anti-imperialist journal, an issue that focuses on the search for “Truth?” in a series of articles about several truth/reconciliation projects, from Chile to Northern Ireland.

The achievements of these organisations are examined, but also their limitations. “Let me tell you quite honestly, truth without justice is not truth; it only means the acknowledgement of what has happened.” (The wife of a Chilean “disappeared”, quoted p20). A “truth and reconciliation committee”…

The ICISS was set up by the Canadian government in 2000 to investigate and report on the “right of humanitarian intervention”, with its members being selected from a variety of backgrounds and nations.

Before preparing their report they organised a series of international discussions and commissioned a set of briefing papers from recognised experts in the field. The CD-ROM contains the papers and summaries of the discussions along with an extensive bibliography. (This supplementary volume is also available in paperback, ISBN 0 8893…

The US describes Colombia as harbouring the hemisphere's biggest terrorist threat. Not surprisingly, the plan it supports to solve Colombia's social ills, Plan Colombia, will have a significantly detrimental effect on the region as a whole. Both these books not only provide a coherent critique of Plan Colombia and offer alternative proposals for dealing with the drugs issue, they delve beneath Colombia as merely an exporter of cocaine or a perpetrator of terrorism and explore the political, social and economic causes of the violence that…

This brief book was initially written by its Colombian author in order to explain to a US American friend the roots of the complex situation of violence in Colombia.

However, it is actually addressed to the population living there, as if the author could not hold back a need to urge a people despised for centuries by their own plunderers (aristocracy of unscrupulous political leaders, immoral world market and ever increasing military expenditure - utterly useless) to recover their dignity.

He comments: “When [...] society is…

Ever find yourself losing your edge? Descending into woolly liberalism? Perhaps even thinking (No!) that those corporations might just, possibly, be reformable?

If there is any mental brake to that slippery slope, this book of cartoons is it. Polyp applies his cruelly sharp wit to globalisation, militarism, corporate power and hypocritical greenwash, exposing the intellectual and moral inconsistencies of so many official statements and positions that we have become so used to that they often pass without comment.

Nike, Coca-…

Palestine, Palestine is an unusual creature, a film about this beautiful and terrible land which shows something of everyday life in the West Bank.

It is not a documentary as such, although it deals with real people and their day-to-day existence. It has more life and lyricism than that. But it is also grounded in reality and makes inescapable the way that the Israeli presence is not just a matter of the brutal incursions which hit the Western news but a daily challenge to the ingenuity and dignity of a people under occupation by a…

The name Arthur Wragg will no doubt be familiar to some of PN's more senior readers. He joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935, and contributed regularly to Peace News in the late 1930s. Later, he would design posters for the PPU, and his pacifism and social radicalism would inform much of his work during a career which spanned over five decades.

It is difficult now to fully appreciate the impact that Wragg's drawings would have had on contemporary audiences. Yet leafing through the pages of this excellent volume I…

If it weren't for the generous injection of black humour, this book would feel almost unbearable. There's no doubting it's a great read, full of revelatory investigation into a huge array of issues, but it's enough to bring you out in a sweat every time you pick it up, with its extensive evidence on how every corner of corporate life is riddled with systemic abuse, and every self-declaring bastion of democracy is hiding some big secrets.

Few of the bigger stories are new in themselves - Bush stealing the Presidency, US involvement…

Could it be that cities get the literary detectives they deserve? What does Ian Rankin's Rebus tell us about contemporary Edinburgh, or even Colin Dexter's Morse about Oxford's dreaming spires?

Well, it's time to add a new name and metropolis to the pantheon, and this guy is distinctive in that he manages to occupy an unlikely middle-ground when it comes to attitude and inclination.

Jean-Claude Izzo's complex creation, the Marseille-dwelling Inspector Montale, is a bon viveur and sensualist, but faces severe challenges to his…