Reviews

More than twenty years ago Dennis Hardy wrote a great book on alternative communities in 19th century England which is now out of print. He has now written a “sequel”, a history of community experiments in England during the first half of the 20th century.

This new book bears some of the stylistic hallmarks of the earlier one: it is written with deep sympathy for the pioneers and their projects. The text is complemented by a host of photographs and other illustrations that help bring the subject matter alive, and the author succeeds…

Dr Bertell believes it is vital for peace workers to be responsible for communicating knowledge, in every way possible, and also to be willing to seek out information, particularly from those most affected by policies and events. This book is a major contribution to this important exchange.

In Planet Earth, the internationally respected scientist states that the most urgent problem facing humanity really is how to sustain Earth, our life-support system. She goes on to say that we need to find a new model of global organisation, not…

Here's the short review – read this book! And just in case you need more persuasion, here are some reasons why.

Cynthia Enloe has probably been the most consistent analyst of gender and militarism over the past decade; the scope of her analysis is wide-ranging, yet her argument is focused and powerful; and unlike many other writers, she really does address gender, rather than merely documenting women's experience.

Though the subjects of each chapter – the mothers buying a can of Star Wars soup, the “camp followers”, the…

In a volume that ranges the whole spectrum of violence against women – from the state to the domestic – States of Conflict presents a snapshot of recent feminist research on gender and violence.

But though the global view presented and the varied perspectives they employed was refreshing, my overall feeling was that the diverse approach ultimately combined to give the general reader little more than an introduction to, rather than an overall analysis of, women's responses to and experience of violence. The quality of the chapters…

This is a book to make you cry with pain or inspiration and joy. Some of the testimonies in it come from the depths of a misery that drives young women, just starting out in life, to declare that “we prefer to die fighting than because of cholera or dysentery”.

Others speak of the incredible strength and determination of women rejecting their traditional roles in order to struggle against poverty, domestic and political violence, the absence of healthcare and education. Mention of the Zapatistas usually conjures up images of…

A dreamlike account of dysfunctional life in the modern French Foreign Legion. Stuck in Marseilles after being cast out from his beloved military “family”, Staff Sergeant Galoup recalls his time in Djibouti as a sun-baked idyll.

From Galoup's remembered perspective the East African landscape seems to be populated with happy, compliant locals and the eroticised bodies of legionnaires. But as Galoup himself says, “viewpoints count”, and this nostalgia-laden view of the post-colonial world is slowly unpicked as the film progresses. The…

Is there a nonviolent alternative to military intervention in those situations which cry out for some kind of international response? In Bosnia, for example, or Kosova,or Rwanda? This is the main challenge which has led to recurrent attempts to undertake cross-border interventions and to establish a permanent peace brigade or “peace army”.

The attempts to date have met with varying degrees of success depending in part on the kind of situation being confronted and the methods adopted. In this excellent and readable book Yeshua…

Genocide, according to the UN Convention of 1948, is defined as any acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. This book represents a review of the various dimensions of a strategy that might lead to a genocide-free world.

The key strands identified include 1) Strengthening the institutions and actors like the UN and NGOs that are dedicated to the monitoring and the protection of human rights - including the establishment of an international criminal court; 2)…

History can be told in many ways,but this book does it with the naked honesty of personal testimonies, from different sides of the Colombian conflict. The wholebook is the process of meeting, listening to and speaking the truth. From the eyes and hearts of Gabriela, Daniel, Mercedes, Socorro, Laura, Antonia, Marcos, Alejandra, Ana Dolores and Angela, we get to know the lives of the displaced, the farmers, the guerrillas.

It reads like a very strange book of short stories but these tales are stark, like trees in winter: without…

It's hard to know what the objective of this book is. The title and blurb make it sound like a book on women on death row. Actually, it's Kathleen O'Shea's autobiography, interspersed at paragraph intervals with excerpts from interviews with ten other women, all ofthem on death row in the USA.

When this format works it is very powerful; often it is a harrowing reminder that the social and psychological forces which result in some women - innocent or guilty - ending up on death row are absolutely the same as those which touch the…

The opening page of this book reads like an unpleasant army thriller, full of mystery and gung-ho action. However repellent this may be, don't let it put you off, because it's not characteristic of most of the rest of Rodriguez's volume.

This is actually a detailed and often fascinating account of the runup to the attempted invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro forces backed by the US. The extent of this backing, and the depth of US hatred of any attempts at independence by states within its orbit, is seen in the speedy reaction to the…

This interesting, engaging and often humorous CD is the edited recording of a lecture given in the summer of 1997 at Colorado College in the US by radical activist and academic Angela Davis.

At the core of this fairly simple lecture is the exposing of links between capitalism, racism and the prison system - and this is done fairly eloquently on the whole.

Drawing on her own prison experience and the experiences of her friends and comrades, combined with a professed ex-communist turned-socialist, feminist analysis, Davis…

This is a guide to a trip every activist should take. There is, of course, only one rogue state -the United States of America. Any evil deed of the US that an activist can imagine in the wildest of paranoid dreams is described and referenced in this comprehensive guide by Blum, a journalist and ex-US State Department official.

In spite of the efforts of US leaders to make their actions appear humanitarian and democratic, Blum makes it clear that the US has run a global protection racket based on four imperatives: making the world…

As an antimilitarist and probably a feminist, I rather liked this diary. While it has, in some ways, quite a US orientation (national holidays, significant events, the relationship between days and dates etc), it is still perfectly usable for anyone using the Christian-derived calendar.

It has a one week to a page display, plus a directory of WRI members, and a list of national (US) peace organisations and publications. However I think the best thing about this diary is the profiles of 57 radical women from around the world who have…

In writing this book, former PN editor Howard Clark has drawn on his close involvement with Kosov@ for over a decade, and with nonviolent theory and action for several decades. Fascinated by a remarkable movement, he hoped to assist in the prevention of war (“Why was the war most warned about not prevented?” p213).

Clark provides a minutely detailed account of these unique developments throughout the decade up to the eruption of extreme violence of 1998-9. Using a wide variety of sources, especially interviews and…