Reviews

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…

Andre Schiffrin, Words and Money (Verso, 2010; 128pp; £12.99).
Dan Hind, The Return of the Public (Verso, 2010; 256pp; £14.99).
Becky Hogge, Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia (Bookkake, 2011; 246pp; £8.99, or available for free download from barefootintocyberspace.com/book).

Imagine a world without small publishers or independent bookshops – perhaps without bookshops at all – where the only cinemas are multiplexes showing films like Transformers 5, and where newspapers – their…

Despite UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s 2007 warning that climate change “is the defining challenge of our age”, since the Copenhagen summit global warming has fallen off the political agenda. No better time then to read these two essential and accessible books to enlighten and inspire action.

Divided into three sections – Science, Politics and Meaning – The Global Warming Reader is an edited collection of 36 seminal scientific papers, newspaper articles and book chapters. Famous environmentalists such as Al Gore and NASA…

Filmed between December 2010 and March 2011, Michael Chanan’s documentary is a collage of video and music capturing the excitement, spontaneity and power of the grassroots movement that exploded into existence as a response to government spending cuts in the universities and beyond.

As well as the video diary elements filmed by Chanan himself, there is interspersed found and borrowed footage, reminding us of how this was a movement interacting with the public sphere, and drawing in wider support from other activists and citizens.…

This book consists of fifteen articles compiled some years ago from interviews with former pupils of AS Neill’s radical educational establishment, Summerhill. The interviewees have between them a huge range of careers, made wider than it might have been by the fact that many individuals changed direction several times. Leonard Lasalle, for instance, gave up working in advertising because it seemed to him to be immoral and ended up as a dealer in antiques.

The contributors are honest and serious about the school, and make many…

I’m a terribly picky reader and my PN reviews can be a little, shall we say, critical? So it’s a delight to be given a book that deserves the plaudits it has received from the likes of Mairead Maguire Corrigan, Daniel Ellsberg and Bruce Kent.

Reading What Nobel Really Wanted reminded me of a great Polyps cartoon – Jesus’ Last Words. As Jesus hangs on the cross the caption reads, “And I don’t want anyone to go twisting what I’ve said into an excuse for a load of right wing bullshit…You got that?” The premise of Heffermehl’s book is…

The third runway campaign is one of the seminal success stories of recent years. A coalition that encompassed local authorities, direct action groups, local resid-ents associations, and others, took on the entwined might of government and aviation industry and won a famous victory.

This booklet outlines the history of that campaign from its beginnings in 1997 to the decision in 2010 to scrap plans for a third runway. It explains the strategy and tactics that worked, the problems that arose and how they were overcome.

Author…

As the last “male principal speaker” for the Green Party for England and Wales, the author of numerous books on environmentalism and a lecturer in political economy, Derek Wall is well placed to write on Green politics.

Due to the quickening climate crisis, it is a politics he describes, in the No-nonsense Guide, as one “of survival”. Wall manages to pack a lot of interesting information and ideas into a short book, including summaries of what he sees as the four pillars of Green political thought: ecology, social justice, grassroots…

Asked days after the 11 September 2001 attacks if US president George W Bush’s “war on terror” was winnable, Noam Chomsky responded: “If we want to consider this question seriously, we should recognise that in much of the world the US is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and with good reason. We might bear in mind, for example, that in 1986 the US was condemned by the World Court for ‘unlawful use of force’ (international terrorism) and then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states (meaning the US) to adhere to…

The Three Trillion Dollar War is exhaustive analysis of the true cost of the war in Iraq. The headline figure – $3 trillion – is an unthinkable amount of money. Half of it, for example, would cover the cost of the United Nation’s eight Millennium Development Goals – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education by 2015.

But, Stiglitz and Bilmes point out, $3 trillion is a conservative estimate of the cost of the war to the US alone. Worldwide a minimum cost would…

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” It’s more than two years since the “great crash” of 2008. Henry Ford’s famous words are as pertinent as ever.

Apart from flashes of anger about bankers’ bonuses there has been no great social movement rising from the ashes of the financial system. Instead, the most articulate voices in response to the banking collapse have come from the political right, where…

The trouble with short story anthologies is that you can never quite tell what you’re going to get. Unless you are familiar with all the writers in the collection, you just have to dive in and hope for the best. Welcome to the Greenhouse is a typical anthology in this regard. Since I’m not a sci-fi fan I’d never heard of any of the authors, and so I dipped in not knowing what to expect.

What I got was a mixed bag. Some fine stories, some dull, some too badly written to finish. The best were the ones that were on the quirky side, the…

“Peace without justice is hollow, a sham, the deathly stillness of tyranny triumphant,” writes Michael Riordon, as he shares his stories of Israelis and Palestinians resisting the occupation, all of whom have experienced harassment from the authorities, sometimes death threats and imprisonment.

The Israelis, immigrants or children of immigrants, all initially supported a Zionist state as a home for Jews, but gradually came to see Israel as a colonialist oppressor. Riordon, a Canadian, had a similar journey. At first subscribing to…

Greg Muttitt’s first solo book follows on from joint projects with socio-environmental arts project Platform, taking on the oil industry, British foreign policy past and present, market dynamics, and the grassroots impact of big powers at play. With this book we see Muttitt shifting into top gear, drawing on the interdisciplinary analysis and corporate super-sleuthing he’s honed over the past 15 years with Platform and Corporate Watch (which he helped co-found) to navigate the neo-con, neo-imperial struggle over Iraq’s oil with fluency,…