Gore Vidal knows how to write. The only problem is that you get the feeling he's written it all before. Literally. Nowhere on the cover (front or back) are you warned that three-quarters of the book is a reprint of articles that appeared previously in Vanity Fair (three) or The Nation (one), which were published as long ago as 1997 (although I can't say the material feels dated, far from it).
The drawback of having read it all before won't apply to everyone of…
When the voices of war and the “war on terrorism” are raised around the world, the voices of women, feminists with different opinions, perspectives and experience are silenced or drowned out.
This volume of essays, personal stories, poetry and statements is a welcome collection of voices from around the world. In the words of the dedication, “... women who have struggled to perfect the difficult and valuable skill of surviving, who refuse to be overwhelmed by the…
Published works relating to forgiveness generally fall into one of three categories. First off are the Christians who urge us all to follow God's example and forgive and embrace all those who have done us wrong. Then there are the therapeutic manuals produced by behavioural psychologists and new-age gurus that tell us how to achieve the mental and emotional fulfilment which is the fruit of forgiveness by a simple six or maybe twelve-stage process. Finally there are the philosophical works…
The Good Shopping Guide is the world's first comprehensive ethical reference guide to clearly list the behaviour of the companies behind everyday consumer brands.
Published by the Ethical Marketing Group, the Good Shopping Guide covers a wide range of products from bananas to computers, pet food to insurance companies, and from its opening statement - “Your till receipt is as important as your vote” - promotes intelligent consumer choice as a way of influencing and encouraging…
This is a very special book. Its main strength lies in the fact that Jillian Edelstein - a professional, South African-born and well known photographer - was there when the Commission did its job. Not only in the geographical places in which it took place, but she also took pictures of the principal actors of this incredible and impressive experience, something which showed the world that apartheid was something that could no longer exist.
Jillian combines her powerful images and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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”,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
