Sarah Irving
This manages to be both an utterly charming book, and to convey a serious message. Skip the introduction its fine, but you can get the explanations of Zapatismo from a hundred other places. Maybe go back to it when you've read the stories. Which are marvellous.
Marcos is well-known for his writing, especially the eloquent communiqués which emerge periodically from the Lacandon jungle. These stories are a different breed whimsical, funny, literary. Don Durito de la Lacandon…
As an individual involved in nonviolent direct action, I'm often suspicious of academic books about activism. What purpose do they serve? They are too often "studies of" rather then any advancement of debates or ideas.
They seem to have little effect in informing the mainstream press or persuading them to be any more open or honest in what they write - as seen in media coverage of the Mayday "riots", which became "riots" some…
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 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…
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…
