I don’t doubt that this is an important book, it’s got a quote from Chomsky on the front, so it must be. And there are plenty of powerful stories in it that need to be heard. But, I did struggle to love it, which might perhaps be my problem.
I think it’s partly stylistic – the writer does tend to describe events in rather breathless “action hero” mode when a simpler clearer prose might do. But it’s also infused at other times with the kind of earnest dourness that gives the peace…
This is a marvellous book about a marvellous man and it’s full of marvels. Remembering Colin Ward comprises transcripts of his friends’ tributes at his funeral – which various PN stalwarts attended – and his memorial meeting in Conway Hall four months later.
In fact, it amounts to a biography in just 50 pages and it makes you wonder at the hundreds of pages spent on lesser beings. To quote from its introductory note: “Colin Ward was an anarchist, a journalist, and an author of books…
This book argues that global warming and bulging human waistlines are products of the same global problems. In Western societies, the car and the television have curtailed human physical activity to unprecedented levels, while a rampant food industry pushes more and more energy-dense foods. The developing world follows our oil-addicted lead, whether it wants to or not.
Fatness is not a personal problem: it is a political problem, as is climate change. Effective, essential action on…
This collection of spoken word and song was originally a project for the 250th anniversary of Paine’s birth. The spoken element consists of quotations from Paine’s work, newspaper reports and diary entries from the period. The songs address contemporary issues and are performed with the passion and sincerity one has come to expect from Leon Rosselson and Robb Johnson.
The excellent sleeve notes by the performers chart the development of the project since its beginning in 1987. The…
With contributions from fourteen campaigners and corporate practitioners, The Fair Trade Revolution is the Fairtrade Foundation’s official, if somewhat dry, history of the movement. It grew out of the grassroots activism of the 1960s, and editor John Bowles contends a “fundamental paradigm shift” has occurred in the last decade, with sales of Fairtrade goods in the UK topping £1 billion last year.
With fair trade guaranteeing producers in the developing world a minimum price for…
Speaking at a public meeting in May 2008, Green Party leader and MP to be, Caroline Lucas noted that the language of fear and disaster surrounding climate change is both “deeply scary and deeply unhelpful.” According to Lucas “trying to terrify people into action” simply doesn’t work.
Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, doesn’t seem to have got the memo because Requiem for a Species is a deeply terrifying read.
According to…
Daniel Pennac, who is a well-known writer in France, was a total failure at school up to the age of fourteen. In the first part of this book he describes his despair, both in vivid anecdotes and general comment. “My God,” he says at one point, “the loneliness of the dunce, ashamed of never being able to do what you are supposed to be doing.” He became an insolent class clown, a vandal and a thief.
His insolence was to some extent justified by the mockery of some of his teachers, but…
This was my first encounter with Simone Weil, the French philosopher, teacher and political activist, and I found her mesmerising – a huge intellect and a huge conscience. She dealt with the challenge that knowing and understanding the world creates an obligation to be involved in it, to affect it, by hurling herself into the stream of life to an extent verging on madness.
Although frail and clumsy, Weil sought out gruelling work in factories and farms; she was a union organiser; she…
The PPU will be well-known to older readers of PN, but perhaps to others only because of the white “peace poppy”. What was once a mass movement supporting the pledge to “renounce war, and never again... [to] support or sanction another” became a small organisation, largely concerned with peace education.
Along the way the organisation faced challenges, losing members during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. The PPU opposed conscription, continuing this opposition into “…
Wobegone is the third solo album by former Chumbawamba member Danbert Nobacon. Chumbawamba were (indeed still are, in their current acoustic incarnation) unique in UK popular music in combining a radical anarchist analysis and action with a creative trajectory that showed the same integrity as their politics.
Never afraid to experiment, their music was, at times, hit-and-miss but some of it was astonishingly, ecstatically good – all the more impressive when you think of the band’s…
Though they need some unpacking, everything you need to know about what to eat can be boiled down to just seven words: “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This is the conclusion of journalist Michael Pollan after years researching nutritional science. His latest book does some of this unpacking, with 64 simple rules for eating healthily and happily.
Though not anti-science, Pollan has framed these in everyday language, noting that while science has confirmed much of what culture…
One of the sessions at PN’s 2010 Summer Camp was entitled “Can we eat our way out of crisis?” “Is that a practical workshop?” one wag asked. Everyone laughed, but if Colin Tudge is right – and on certain fundamentals I suspect that he is – then perhaps it should have been.
A modest proposal
Though best-known for his rather wonderful science writing (recent books include a Secret Life of Trees and a book on the evolution and classification of birds) Tudge has also spent over…
With industrial civilisation destroying the planet, How Shall I Live my Life? is “the only question worth asking” according to the radical thinker Derrick Jensen. Thus the ten wide-ranging interviews with largely American activists, philosophers and writers conducted by Jensen centre on each person’s holistic methods of resistance to the environmental degradation caused by the dominant culture.
Reconnecting to the natural world, looking to indigenous cultures and increasing democracy…
The dogma of deterrence is now so deeply ingrained that the national corruption implicit in the willingness to murder the innocent is ignored. Robert Green dares to differ. For many years he was an aircraft bombardier who, if ordered, would have dropped a UK nuclear bomb near St Petersburg, causing “appallingly indiscriminate casualties and long-term poisonous effects from radioactive fallout” as well as destroying a beautiful ancient capital.
Luckily, he has seen the error of his…
As a child William Morris lived near Epping Forest, a place he would later describe as “always interesting and always beautiful”.
Kathy Haslam, curator of Blackwell and co-curator of this exhibition with Helen Elletson, curator of Kelmscott House, sees Morris’s sense of place as a thread running through his life and work. The exhibition tries to show how important place was to him. It looks at the successive places where he lived and worked and shows the logical development from his…
