Virginia Moffatt
Within this book, there’s a thoughtful treatise against climate change struggling to get out. It never quite makes it, which is a shame, as Alastair McIntosh has some important things to say. One of the main problems is structure. Part one deals with the science of climate change and political dilemmas; part two, with a spiritual response.
The trouble with this approach is that the book becomes neither one thing nor the other, particularly when the style veers between dense analysis…
They say that families live prison sentences just as much as the prisoner and that was certainly true for us. On January 22, my husband Chris Cole was sentenced to 28 days imprisonment for non-payment of a fine incurred at an anti-war protest in 2005.
This event was not a surprise to us, we had been planning for it in one way or another ever since we first met. However, recognising something is inevitable and dealing with the actual experience are two separate things.
The…
In popular myth, the Second World War has been cast as the last just war. Since Hitler was an evil tyrant who murdered millions of Jewish people, Britain and America had no option but to fight him. Churchill and Roosevelt were towering heroes, who did everything they could to minimise the effects of war on civilians, in order to rescue Europe from oppression.
Human Smoke is a welcome debunking of this legend. In it, Nicholson Baker has put together an impressive account of the origins…
Flying Close to the Sun tells how Cathy Wilkerson transformed herself from a nice middle class girl to a violent revolutionary. Describing how she became involved in left-wing politics as a student, the book charts her developing understanding of the political issues of the 1960s and ’70s and how she begins to see violence as a possible tool to respond to injustice.
Wilkerson is at her best when she describes the debates around the formation of the Weather Underground and the…
Gandhi and Beyond is divided into three parts: the first two chapters look at the work of Gandhi and Martin Luther King; the next three at how their ideas have been used by other activists such as Cesar Chavez and Dorothy Day; and the final two at issues of gender and principles for action. The author says in his introduction that he hopes it will add to academic knowledge about nonviolence, whilst also inspiring people to act. I think he is more successful in the former objective, than the…
