Reviews

Bongo-player, brilliant raconteur and Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman was also one of the scientists who helped to build the first atomic bombs at Los Alamos.

After the first successful test Feynman was elated, playing an improvised drum on the hood of a jeep, but later sank into a deep depression, convinced that global nuclear war was inevitable. To his credit he later came to regret at least part of his role, and decided never to work on classified projects again.

If you haven’t already read Feynman’s…

People forget too quickly. This little book is a great reminder of much that has been achieved, so far, by Labour Action for Peace which began life in 1940 as the Labour Pacifist Fellowship.

Long before then, back to the days of Keir Hardie, there have been those in the Labour party with the same vision and hope.

The book is a fascinating trip down memory lane, from the introduction by Tony Benn to the cheery photo of current LAP president, Jeremy Corbyn.

The cast is enormous. Included amongst many others are Frank…

As the BBC Newsnight economics editor, Paul Mason has become a familiar face on television over the last few years, reporting on the protest movements, revolutions and revolts that have been “kicking off” across the globe since 2009.

Mason is also a keen blogger, and it is these (albeit now cleaned up) postings that form the backbone of this electrifying new book.

The essence of his argument is that “we’re in the middle of a revolution caused by the near collapse of free-market capitalism combined with an upswing in technical…

A common argument in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein could only be toppled by a foreign invasion, that it was impossible for Iraqis themselves to remove such a brutal dictator.

An insightful and stirring look at the life and work of Gene Sharp, How To Start A Revolution demolishes this argument. Countering the widely accepted view of nonviolence as hopelessly naïve, the 84-year-old professor of political science has spent his life documenting the numerous examples of nonviolent resistance that have…

Bradt commissioned Sarah Irving to write this updated version in 2010, and it is gratifying to read a travel guide entitled Palestine rather than Israel and the Occupied Territories.

A seasoned campaigner, Sarah has been a frequent visitor to Palestine since 2001, and the result is a meticulously-researched book that offers the visitor a mine of information, suitable for both activists and inquisitive travellers.

The West Bank, Gaza and Palestinian communities in Israel…

Andrew Feinstein’s The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade has been a long time coming. Anyone with more than a casual acquaintance with the arms industry will be well aware of its arsenal of libel lawyers, and the alacrity with which they descend upon all but the most cast iron of assertions against it. In this day and age it takes a brave publisher to put out such a book as Feinstein’s latest tome, and it is little surprise that there has not been a work of such scope and…

Michael Kaufman and Michael Kimmel, Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York, are two of the biggest names in contemporary Men’s Studies, writing heavyweight books with wordy titles like The Gender of Desire: Essays on Masculinity and Theorizing Patriarchy.

In contrast, The Guy’s Guide to Feminism is a short, consciously popular and non-academic introduction to feminism for men. Noting that feminism is still very much needed today, the authors…

“The question,” Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty memorably asserted about words “is which is to be master – that’s all.” And the same goes for the digital technologies that now play an increasingly important role in our lives.

“Like the participants of media revolutions before our own,” Rushkoff notes “we have embraced the new technologies and literacies of our age without actually learning how they work and work on us. And so we, too, remain one step behind the…

Translated from the French, Depleted Uranium: Deadly, Dangerous & Indiscriminate: The Full Picture attempts to bridge the gap between campaigning polemic and scientific argument in the area of depleted uranium (DU). One of the strengths of the book is that the authors generally make take the difficult, but correct, decision to leave open questions on which hard evidence is simply absent. This is a welcome contrast to the tendency amongst some anti-DU activists to talk up apocalyptic fears that lack credible supporting evidence…

The history of the cowboy film is shameful. There are a few exceptions, but taken as a whole, the genre is one long glorification of the conquest and extermination of the indigenous peoples of North America.

One exception was Dances with wolves (1990, directed by and starring Kevin Costner), which is highly sympathetic to Native Americans. The film cost $18m to make, took $424m at the box office worldwide, and won the Oscar for best picture.

Flash forward to 2011, and a new politically-correct western: Cowboys and Aliens. (…

Laurie Penny aka “Penny Red”, first grabbed my attention earlier this year with her heartfelt and well-constructed articles about the student protests. But it was her twitter feed on 27 March that confirmed me as a big fan. This was the day of the anti-cuts march that saw protests all over London. I don’t quite know how she did it, but Penny seemed to be everywhere, giving an honest and unique perspective that we never saw in the mainstream media.

So it’s an absolute pleasure to have been given Penny’s fine collection of articles as…

Malcolm X came to public notice as a black supremacist, the public voice of the right-wing separatist African-American cult, “the Nation of Islam”, known for his brilliant and vitriolic anti-white rhetoric. He was, in the early 1960s, the most prominent African-American critic of nonviolence – though he himself never engaged in violent action against white racism. By the time of his assassination in February 1965, Malcolm X had broken with the Nation of Islam, discarded black separatism, converted to orthodox Sunni Islam, accepted alliances…

Emily James spent a year embedded in the environmental direct action movement with groups like Plane Stupid, Climate Camp, Bike Block and others, gaining their confidence and trying to capture the passion, commitment, and excitement of putting direct action into practice.

The resulting film is a dense, fascinating, fast-moving work in which we meet and follow a variety of individuals, and hear stories from their lives as activists. We see them in action at the Vestas wind turbine factory occupation, the Blackheath Climate Camp, and…

"This book", says Tim Gee at the start of the first chapter, "will make a bold claim. That a single idea helps explain why social movements past and present have succeeded, partially succeeded, or failed. Strategically applied, it has helped win campaigns, secure human rights, stop wars and even bring down governments."

The central idea is Counterpower, which he describes as "the resistance of the oppressed". There are three types of Counterpower: Idea Counterpower which challenges the dominant ideology on an intellectual level,…

Like Bob Dylan, the source of this bookís title, Brian Willson celebrated his 70th birthday this year. I first heard about Willson while living in the US at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker in 2001. There I heard the story of how he lost his legs while trying to stop a train exporting arms to Nicaragua in 1987. I knew little more, but Willson soon joined the growing number of inspirational resisters I learned about and met during the two years I spent there. Some of these are named in this book and reading it was a great joy for me as those…