Reviews

Many readers of Peace News will be familiar with one kind of protest camp or another – but this book may find more readers in your local Social Studies department than it will on the streets of the next Occupy.

That doesn’t mean it has no value for activists. Far from it. It is a rich source of information both on camps too far away or too long ago for today’s young Occupier to know, and on lots of theoretical issues that recur and revolve around such camps.

But the book does often read more like a PhD thesis…

Rose Bridger has written a book on aviation quite unlike any other. In its scope, it is unique.

It ranges from the technical details of aircraft to the impact of new greenfield airports on poor farmers in India, from biofuels to aerotropolises.

Plane Truth is a book for activists. Bridger doesn’t hide where she is coming from. It is written from the perspective of an environmentalist: somebody who is concerned about the trafficking of arms across the world, who has little sympathy with international…

This book transcends glib positions about the internet and social movements (eg ‘social media cause revolution’ or ‘the internet should be discounted altogether in resistance’) to offer a rich and considered analysis, backed up by engaging case studies from a range of issues, communities and continents.

Hill doesn’t downplay the net’s influence, noting that social media sites such as YouTube have made it easier ‘to see the truth that the powerful would rather hide’, affecting the…

Although it’s only a small booklet accompanying a very short DVD, produced on a low budget, and it would be easy to overlook it, this new resource from the Movement for the Abolition of War (MAW) is more important than it at first looks. After all, it deals with possibly the biggest global concern for nonviolent revolutionaries today: how war and climate change are inextricably linked and why we need to work on them as one issue.

The small size is key to the beauty of the project…

Although the corporate world has long claimed the values of self-help, entrepreneurialism and innovation for itself, this book – based on the ideas of the Transition movement, of which Rob Hopkins is the founder and figurehead – proves that progressive activists have as strong a claim on these principles as anyone else.

Encouraging local action to combat global threats, the Transition movement is a grassroots network of communities around the world active in over 40 countries,…

What does a book about therapy have to do with the peace movement?

Psychological difficulties and their treatment are often thought of as a personal and humanitarian issue, as apolitical. Paul Moloney disagrees; he argues that much of the unhappiness treated by therapists is the result of living in relative poverty, powerlessness and inequality in a consumer society.

These problems demand collective social change; yet the disciplines of psychiatry and…

At a time when many people in politics and the peace movement are focussing on the centenary of the start of the First World War, it may be thought inappropriate to bring out a book concerning the re-run 20 years later. Ann Kramer’s book, however, is a salutary reminder, not only of the irony of HG Wells’s 1914 book title (The War that Will End War) but also of the strength of the Second World War pacifist movement that largely had its roots in the struggle against the earlier war.

It is 30…

On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King Jnr delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC to an audience of over 200,000 marchers, calling for economic and racial justice for Black Americans and an end to segregation. Unbeknown to him, the justice department had installed a secret cut-off device in the sound system, so that they could turn off the speakers if they saw fit. Meanwhile, the Pentagon had 19,000 troops on standby.

Two days later, William Sullivan, the FBI’s assistant…

Activism and resistance – both violent and nonviolent – take centre stage in the New Internationalist’s latest comic book (Fight the Power! A visual history of Protest Among the English-Speaking Peoples; 192pp; £9.99). Written by Séan Michael Wilson (Parecomic) and Benjamin Dickson, and illustrated by John Spelling, Adam Parson and the wonderful Hunt Emerson (How to be Rich, Ratz), it covers fourteen separate…

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 book Manufacturing Consent offered a ‘Propaganda Model’ for analysing our dysfunctional mainstream media system, four of whose ‘five filters’ David Cromwell outlines as: ‘heavy dependence [of corporate media] on advertising revenue; reliance on approved news sources such as governments and business; the threat, and use, of flak by powerful interests to keep the media in line; and an ideological framework that demonises state-designated enemies’. (The fifth filter is corporate ownership of the…

In his latest book on the built environment, Owen Hatherley visits 17 towns and cities across Britain, presenting an architecturally-inflected state of the nation.

Part travelogue, part searing political critique, the book takes the form of a series of ‘urban trawls’, bringing the author to ‘some extremely unlovely places’: the Thames Gateway, Belfast, Birmingham, the City of London (‘the satanic site at the heart of the UK’s malaise’).

On each journey, Hatherley finds a Britain failing in intellect and imagination,…

If you’ve been an activist in the UK for any length of time then it’s likely – whether you know it or not — that you’ve rubbed shoulders with one or more spies. In 15 years of activism, I can think of three definite cases of infiltration of the groups that I’ve been involved with.

There was ‘Rod’, the undercover police officer who infiltrated the WOMBLES (the ‘White Overall Movement Building Liberation Effective Struggles’, a UK anti-capitalist group who adopted some of the tactics of the Italian group Tute Bianche – eds…

Like the author of this book, I’ve had the experience of working for a large NGO (non-governmental organisation) and, in the process, becoming de-skilled, de-motivated, uncreative and disempowered.

After a couple of years of struggling with hierarchy and unimaginative bureaucracy, I left to do more activism, study for an art degree, and work part-time for a small start-up charity where my skills have been appreciated and nurtured. So naturally I was keen to crack open my copy of this book, and I was well rewarded!

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This book explores the revolutionary politics and activism that sprang up in Argentina in December 2001. With the state collapsing in the midst of a severe economic crisis, sections of the population responded by organising demonstrations and neighbourhood assemblies.

In the months and years following this societal rupture, workers began to occupy their workplaces and alternative media outlets and extensive barter…

Since creating the post-religious Church of Stop Shopping in 1999, the Reverend Billy has held services in churches, community centres, forests, fields, parking lots, shopping malls and – above all – inside brand-name stores across the US and Europe, preaching against consumerism, and for economic and ecological justice.

The creation of actor Bill Talen, the Reverend Billy is a televangelist-style preacher with Elvis hair…