Short Review

PN readers will be familiar with Donald Rooum's eponymous feline from the single-frame cartoons that appear on the editorial page. In Wildcat Keeps Going, he has a larger canvas to work on. Targets include prudes, religion, and (of course) militarists.

Over the past 13 years the American artist Josh MacPhee has commissioned over 100 posters celebrating revolution, racial justice, women's rights, queer liberation, peace activism and labour struggles. Collected here in one volume – and stretching from the Diggers’ 1649 occupation of George’s Hill to contemporary actions against the arms trade – these images, as Rebecca Solnit notes in her foreword, “cohere into the radical past on which a radical future can be built.”

In 1986 the French photographer Didier Lefevre travelled to Afghanistan with Médecins sans Frontières to document their work there in the midst of the Soviet occupation.  This stunning non-fiction blend of Didier's text and photos and cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert's Tintin-esque drawings tells the story of their arduous journey across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the doctors’ work treating the victims of the war, and Didier's near-fatal return journey, following a foolish decision on his…

Providing material not only for Remembrance Sunday but for other occasions which call for reflection on the reality of war and its cost, and the desire to work for peace and its cost too. The introduction on Henry Allingham and Harry Patch sets the tone which, in a variety of ways, honours the words of Harry Patch: “War isn’t worth one life”.

Don’t let the rather complicated title of this book put you off. Gareth Peirce, the author of this very important book, is more than well known as the solicitor who has given hope to so many lost in the networks of legal injustice.

She gives us a sombre warning: “We could never have envisaged that the history of the new century would encompass the destruction and distortion of fundamental Anglo-American legal and political principles in place since the 17th century.”

That is…

The late GA Cohen opens this tiny monograph (barely 10,000 words, if that) with a simple thought experiment. Imagine a camping trip where one of your fellow campers is very good at fishing but demands that he should have better fish to eat than the rest of you in recognition of his abilities. A cache of nuts is discovered, but only Leslie knows the trick to crack them open – however, she wants to charge for sharing this information.
It sounds crazy, of course, because most people…

Our columnist Jeff Cloves has a fine new book out. Horray for the small press. Outside the highrise city of Amazon and HarperCollins there lies a beautiful world of the little books, the nonprofit making pamphlets, the poetry, the experiments, the zines, the finely crafted, the books of love, books stapled by authors, books believed in by small presses. Jeff Cloves and Fred Chance bring us Picture This, a beautiful collection of photographs and writings.

Impeccably researched and attractively presented, this should be the first port of call for anyone wishing to take action on the growing menace of robotic warfare.
 

Evocative, well-written account of post-Katrina struggles for social justice in New Orleans by (white) participant-journalist Flaherty, with plenty of lessons for activists further-afield. Indeed, as Flaherty himself notes, “These struggles are global, and should concern us all.” Not to be missed.
 

In Appalachia, coal companies blow the tops off mountains in order to mine the thin layers of coal underneath. They call it Mountaintop Removal (MTR) and its impact on local communities and the environment is predictably devastating. Opposition is rare, as those who stick their necks out “often get whacked in the head”. Nonetheless, over the past five years hundreds of people – both locals and outsiders – have stood up and taken part in nonviolent resistance to MTR. This is their story.…

The intellectual father of the modern animal rights movement takes on world poverty, advocating a form of radical philanthropy. Provocative and challenging, with some ingenious thought experiments and marvellous examples (eg the teacher who made $45m through real estate investing, gave almost all of it away, and donated one of his kidneys to a stranger). Arguably of greater moral significance than his work on either animals or abortion, the arguments in this book certainly deserve the widest…

Info-packed articles from Engelhardt’s popular anti-war blog TomDispatch.com (much better known in the US). Includes the text of a speech Obama could have given in December 2009, announcing the beginning of negotiations with the Taliban and the phased withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
 

”Short” is the key word here