Reviews

Every now and then, Peace News sends me a book which I absolutely love from start to finish. Despite the clunky title, this is one of those books. It’s a terrific read that tells you everything you need to know about why austerity is prevalent, what it does and some pointers on how to resist it.

The book is in two parts: the first, ‘Demolition’, deals with the causes of austerity and its impact on all areas of society. The second, ‘Austerity and Democracy’, charts its chilling impact on our democratic freedoms. ‘Demolition’…

‘Numbers, measures, and metrics profoundly influence our daily existence’, the editors of this academic volume note. And, with statistics having ‘very real and quite significant political, humanitarian, legal and scholarly consequences’, they are therefore ‘deeply political’.

However, considering the relative importance of numbers, the authors argue many people – and I would count myself as one of them – are ‘relatively innumerate’, and thus susceptible to being misled, or flat out lied to, through the use of statistics.
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I remember talking to a friend about this book when it was first published in 2013. Climate change, its potential to end civilisation as we know it, and a practical plan for how to tackle it, had been the central topics of his previous book, Heat (see PN 2480-81). But now it looked like George Monbiot had gone off on a tangent. And, while clearly it was something that he was passionate about, it didn't sound like it was much of a priority for either of us.

In fact, the two books are linked: both directly (…

For 40 years, Kim Stallwood (sometimes known as ‘The Grumpy Vegan’) has been an active animal advocate. Growl combines autobiography, social history and an exploration of the philosophy and practice of animal rights. It is an engaging and readable book which made me draw parallels with other areas of nonviolent campaigning.After working in a chicken slaughterhouse, Stallwood became a vegetarian in 1974, aged 19. Two years later he became a fully-fledged vegan. Unlike today, when all supermarkets stock soya milk and dairy-free meals…

How can we create a sustainable art world, where artists can live by their labour and the public can have a healthy engagement with them? Curating is, or should be, a public service akin to a friend introducing you to new music. But in a world of power lists, billionaire superdealers and sickening Miami conventions, we have travelled very far from the idea of curating as a social duty.

David Balzer’s writing is admirably clear and anti-theoretical, providing a lively history of the avant-garde, as well as documenting artists’…

This dense, complex history interweaves the political, legal and technical background to America’s use of lethal armed drones with the details of how drone operations work in practice.

It begins with the invention of modern drones, first used for surveillance during the (1991) Iraq war, and then fitted with armaments during the hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2001.

Since then, US targeted killings by armed drones have become more and more frequent not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.…

In A Study in Scarlet, Dr Watson is famously scandalised by Sherlock Holmes’ lack of basic astronomical knowledge, writing: ‘That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.’

Over 125 years later, there are still plenty of people who share Holmes’ ignorance. Indeed, a 2012 poll found that just over a quarter of US residents thought that the sun goes around the earth and –…

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation was one of the most significant economics books of the 20th century.

Polanyi was an Austrian-born historian and economist who mixed in Viennese intellectual circles with the founders of neoliberalism, Ludvig von Mises and Fredrich Hayek. But Polanyi was a lifelong critic of his neoliberal contemporaries and, in The Great Transformation, he sought to show how markets are neither natural nor inevitable, but instead have been consciously created, with rules to suit and enrich…

Indian writer and dissident Arundhati Roy’s work has long embodied John Pilger’s belief that a journalist should be ‘an agent of ordinary people, not of those who seek to control them.’ Scathing and lucid, the slim Capitalism: A Ghost Story, is no exception.

Made up of seven short, accessible essays, Roy deftly skewers the hypocrisy and rapacious nature of India’s elite, highlighting the extreme inequality and poverty, corruption and subjugation that are endemic in ‘The World’s Largest Democracy’.

The book’s…

Once upon a time (not very long ago), most white feminists didn’t think about how stereotypes of white womanhood helped to maintain racist ideologies. But though the word ‘intersectional’ may not have been coined until 1989 (by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw), black feminists have long been writing about – and at – the intersections of race, class and gender.

Vron Ware’s groundbreaking book discusses these ideas in a critical look at the historical interactions between feminists and struggles for racial justice. First published…

Capitalism is often thought of as driven by elites bent on attacking the lower classes. The enemy is clearly defined, the targets obvious. All we need to do is redistribute wealth and minimise their control.

In this lively if unhelpful book, Peter Fleming subscribes to this view wholesale, discussing ‘the palpable hatred that the neoliberal state apparatus has for most working people’, treating them ‘as if they are an “enemy within” requiring constant harassment and purging’.

However inconvenient it may be though,…

Tom Morton-Smith’s newly-commissioned play for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) – the story of a great figure brought low by a fatal flaw – has something of the classical tragedy about it.

Watching a previous dramatisation of the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ (the BBC’s seven-part series Oppenheimer, first broadcast in 1980), some reviewers could believe that the defect lay in physicist J Robert Oppenheimer’s early communist sympathies, his adultery and his post-war political conflicts.

Here, concentrating on…

In 1832 a major outbreak of cholera struck London. According to a government report, it was 'proof of the judgement of God among us'. With this in mind, a 'National Fast Day' was proposed, with the aim of preventing the spread of disease. The irony wasn’t lost on the poor. The National Union of the Working Classes 'encouraged its supporters to enjoy a "Feast Day" which, it argued, would benefit the poor far more.' After all, they had precious little to eat in the first place!

Covering the period of 1830 - 1930, Rosenberg’s lesson…

At the first nonviolence training I ever attended, I was given a copy of Gene Sharp's famous list of the '198 methods of nonviolent action' (the 199th method, the trainers opined, was to flypost copies of the list itself). I subsequently purchased a second-hand copy of Sharp's famous three-volume work The Politics of Nonviolent Action but – like many others, I suspect – never did much more than dip into it. For one thing it was long, and – perhaps more…

It’s easy to forget, but art galleries are ‘our’ galleries: they are supposed to belong to us. You might even like to think of them as having taken the place of (now defunct) churches. So how did oil money seep through their walls?

Mel Evans begins by charting the journey of arts funding in the UK. The Arts Council of Attlee’s postwar Britain was deliberately at arm’s length from the state. Thatcher and Tebbit increased government involvement, which enabled New Labour to follow with its claim that the market encourages art’s…