Reviews

“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…

These books offer three very different perspectives on the exploitation of animals for food by humans: one from a land activist (Fairlie), one from an angry ex-vegan (Keith), and one written by passionate animal rights advocates (Torres and Torres).

Putting my cards as reviewer on the table, I’m philosophically an omnivore though practically a near-vegetarian; my agricultural experience is limited to growing up in Somerset and tending an under-producing allotment for 10 years; and professionally I have been involved with scientific…

“Our South Africa moment has finally arrived,” is Omar Barghouti’s rallying call for a global BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement to support the struggle for human rights in Palestine. In this book he eloquently and persuasively sets out the arguments for BDS against Israel in order to end its oppression of the Palestinians that is in defiance of both UN resolutions and international law.

Academic and co-founder of BDS, Barghouti draws on the South African anti-apartheid movement to both describe Israeli oppression and to…

At first I thought that Sober Living for the Revolution was about historical, successful “sober” anarchist collectives and how they organised. The first part of the title misled me. Then I read the rest of the title which went on as “Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics”. Second thoughts: “Oh no! Interviews with a bunch of straight-edgers!” To be honest, being into hardcore punk, I never got into the whole straight edge scene in the same way that Ian Mackaye didn’t (whose song the whole thing started from), because it always…

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Originally published (for Burmese dissidents) in 1993, From Dictatorship to Democracy has since been translated into at least 28 other languages, and has now been reprinted in English by Housmans Peace Bookshop.

Sharp’s analysis – and this short book in particular – has reportedly played a significant inspirational role in a whole series of nonviolent uprisings, from Serbia to Egypt. Nonetheless, his leaden prose, the extremely general nature of much of the analysis and the lack of fleshed-out historical examples make this heavy…

In 1986, documentary and fashion photographer Iain McKell was sent by the Observer to photograph the new age traveller “Peace Convoy” on its way to Stonehenge. A year earlier, the police had attacked the convoy in what has become known as “the Battle of the Beanfield”. It was, said an ITN journalist present, “the most brutal police treatment of people that I’ve witnessed in my entire career”.

In 2001, McKell revisited the new age traveller community to see how the subculture had developed since those tumultuous times. He fell in with…

“I like… Peace News, the best of the weeklies”. So wrote Jack Overhill in his diary of daily life and activities as a shoe repairer and pacifist conscientious objector (CO) in Cambridge during the Second World War.

Born into a family of bootmakers, and ordered by his father to leave school at 14, Jack devoted all his spare time to self-education and attempts at novel-writing, as well as keeping a diary for most of his adult life. The 25 typescript volumes were deposited in the Cambridgeshire County Library, and the editor has…

I don’t doubt that this is an important book, it’s got a quote from Chomsky on the front, so it must be. And there are plenty of powerful stories in it that need to be heard. But, I did struggle to love it, which might perhaps be my problem.

I think it’s partly stylistic – the writer does tend to describe events in rather breathless “action hero” mode when a simpler clearer prose might do. But it’s also infused at other times with the kind of earnest dourness that gives the peace movement a bad name.

Those quibbles aside,…

This is a marvellous book about a marvellous man and it’s full of marvels. Remembering Colin Ward comprises transcripts of his friends’ tributes at his funeral – which various PN stalwarts attended – and his memorial meeting in Conway Hall four months later.

In fact, it amounts to a biography in just 50 pages and it makes you wonder at the hundreds of pages spent on lesser beings. To quote from its introductory note: “Colin Ward was an anarchist, a journalist, and an author of books on architecture, work, childhood, education,…

This book argues that global warming and bulging human waistlines are products of the same global problems. In Western societies, the car and the television have curtailed human physical activity to unprecedented levels, while a rampant food industry pushes more and more energy-dense foods. The developing world follows our oil-addicted lead, whether it wants to or not.

Fatness is not a personal problem: it is a political problem, as is climate change. Effective, essential action on climate change is essential action for public…

This collection of spoken word and song was originally a project for the 250th anniversary of Paine’s birth. The spoken element consists of quotations from Paine’s work, newspaper reports and diary entries from the period. The songs address contemporary issues and are performed with the passion and sincerity one has come to expect from Leon Rosselson and Robb Johnson.

The excellent sleeve notes by the performers chart the development of the project since its beginning in 1987. The songs have changed over the years which means that…

Can a book of “tweets” (140-character-or-less micro-messages) really be readable? The answer is a resounding yes (and don’t worry if you’re not Twitter-savvy, I certainly wasn’t).

Through careful selection the editors have created an inspiring and coherent narrative that not only explains the evolving strategies of both sides but also allows personalities to shine through. Nonviolence played a crucial role throughout, especially in the early decisive confrontations with the police (“Police throw rocks @ demonstrtrs while we raised…

With contributions from fourteen campaigners and corporate practitioners, The Fair Trade Revolution is the Fairtrade Foundation’s official, if somewhat dry, history of the movement. It grew out of the grassroots activism of the 1960s, and editor John Bowles contends a “fundamental paradigm shift” has occurred in the last decade, with sales of Fairtrade goods in the UK topping £1 billion last year.

With fair trade guaranteeing producers in the developing world a minimum price for their product and an additional premium to be invested…

In the final sentence of her book Judith Suissa sums up what she has attempted to do. This was to establish that however doubtful the feasibility of anarchist society may be, exploring anarchism is “an educationally valuable and constructive project”. The exercise involved prolonged comparison of anarchist and liberal views. Both anarchists and liberals, she says, adhere to the view that humans have an inherent capacity for goodness. The difference is that anarchists believe that before you can have an anarchist society, you must train…