Ian Sinclair
Michael Kaufman and Michael Kimmel, Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York, are two of the biggest names in contemporary Men’s Studies, writing heavyweight books with wordy titles like The Gender of Desire: Essays on Masculinity and Theorizing Patriarchy.
In contrast, The Guy’s Guide to Feminism is a short, consciously popular and non-academic introduction to feminism for men. Noting that feminism…
"This book", says Tim Gee at the start of the first chapter, "will make a bold claim. That a single idea helps explain why social movements past and present have succeeded, partially succeeded, or failed. Strategically applied, it has helped win campaigns, secure human rights, stop wars and even bring down governments."
The central idea is Counterpower, which he describes as "the resistance of the oppressed". There are three types of Counterpower: Idea Counterpower which challenges…
Last year Matthew Alford published Reel Power: Hollywood cinema and American supremacy (Pluto Press), an analysis of mainstream US cinema’s representation of US foreign policy since 9/11. He discussed his book with Peace News at the Rebellious Media Conference.
PN: What is the main argument of Reel Power?
MA: That Hollywood films which depict American foreign policy have a very strong tendency to support notions of American “exceptionalism” and almost never criticise it at a…
Despite UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s 2007 warning that climate change “is the defining challenge of our age”, since the Copenhagen summit global warming has fallen off the political agenda. No better time then to read these two essential and accessible books to enlighten and inspire action.
Divided into three sections – Science, Politics and Meaning – The Global Warming Reader is an edited collection of 36 seminal scientific papers, newspaper articles and book chapters. Famous…
As the last “male principal speaker” for the Green Party for England and Wales, the author of numerous books on environmentalism and a lecturer in political economy, Derek Wall is well placed to write on Green politics.
Due to the quickening climate crisis, it is a politics he describes, in the No-nonsense Guide, as one “of survival”. Wall manages to pack a lot of interesting information and ideas into a short book, including summaries of what he sees as the four pillars of Green…
Established in 1977, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is an independent women’s organisation fighting for human rights and social justice in Afghanistan. RAWA opposed the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-89, as well as the subsequent mujahideen and Taliban governments, running underground schools for Afghan girls, publishing a journal and setting up humanitarian projects. Mariam Rawi, a member of RAWA’s foreign relations committee,…
Born in 1957, American activist Keith McHenry is one of the founding members of Food Not Bombs, a revolutionary movement that works for nonviolent social change by serving surplus food to the public that would otherwise be thrown away or go to waste. Established in 1980 by eight anti-nuclear activists in Boston, Food Not Bombs has served food to rescue workers responding to the attacks on 9/11, to survivors of hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami and to the tent city protestors during the…
Born in 1947, Michael Albert has been a radical activist since he opposed the Vietnam War as a student at MIT in Boston in the 1960s. He has gone on to write more than 15 books and establish some of the most important organisations of the American radical left – from the progressive publishing house South End Press, to Z Magazine, and the popular website ZNet. A visionary and strategist, Albert, along with Robin Hahnel, has developed a form of “participatory economics”, or Parecon, as an…
Since setting up the Media Lens website in 2002, David Edwards and David Cromwell have been publishing regular free Media Alerts “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”. Dissecting the reporting of issues such as Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and climate change in the liberal media (the BBC, Guardian, Independent and so on) Media Lens encourages readers to email individual journalists to take them to task, always urging those that do “to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non…
In 1986, documentary and fashion photographer Iain McKell was sent by the Observer to photograph the new age traveller “Peace Convoy” on its way to Stonehenge. A year earlier, the police had attacked the convoy in what has become known as “the Battle of the Beanfield”. It was, said an ITN journalist present, “the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career”.
In 2001, McKell revisited the new age traveller community to see how the subculture had…
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…
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…
A recent edition to the New Internationalist’s “No-Nonsense” book series, Symon Hill’s short guide to religion is a readable introduction to an often controversial and misrepresented subject.
Hill, a Quaker Christian who is the co-director of the Ekklesia thinktank and former media spokesperson for Campaign Against the Arms Trade, argues: “For every example of a link between religion and oppression, there is a link between religion and liberation”.
To illustrate the former he…
Focusing on the 1919 general strike in Seattle – the first in the US – Revolution in Seattle is a dense, journalistic account of early twentieth-century radical agitation in Washington state.
Originally published in 1964, and now republished to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 1999 “Battle of Seattle”, Harvey O’Connor’s memoir of this forgotten chapter in US history is a timely tribute to the late historian Howard Zinn’s belief in documenting “people’s history”.
As the…
