Reviews

As a child William Morris lived near Epping Forest, a place he would later describe as “always interesting and always beautiful”.

Kathy Haslam, curator of Blackwell and co-curator of this exhibition with Helen Elletson, curator of Kelmscott House, sees Morris’s sense of place as a thread running through his life and work. The exhibition tries to show how important place was to him. It looks at the successive places where he lived and worked and shows the logical development from his early love of nature and history, through his…

The book is not a guide to collectives, or facilitation, or consensus. It presumes a certain prior knowledge and experience of all of these, and is for those who want to understand, and better deal with, the problems and pitfalls of working within collective structures.

The authors’ use their first hand experience to look at the realities of power and personality dynamics in supposedly egalitarian groups. This includes things like manipulative and coercive behaviour (both in individuals and in the group), dealing with conflicts,…

If you could choose any of the characters from your childhood reading, who would you invite to help you spark a revolution? James Bond? Harry Potter? Badger from The Wind and the Willows?

If you’re the central character in Paco Igancio Taibo’s tricksy novella – one of PM Press’s new “Found in Translation” series – you choose Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, D’Artagnan, Dick Turpin, the Light Brigade, and then throw in some Mau Mau fighters for good measure.

Set in the wake of the infamous October 1968 Tlatelolco massacre (in…

A recent edition to the New Internationalist’s “No-Nonsense” book series, Symon Hill’s short guide to religion is a readable introduction to an often controversial and misrepresented subject.

Hill, a Quaker Christian who is the co-director of the Ekklesia thinktank and former media spokesperson for Campaign Against the Arms Trade, argues: “For every example of a link between religion and oppression, there is a link between religion and liberation”.

To illustrate the former he includes a shocking quote from the Bishop of London…

The Nation, the United States’ leading left-liberal magazine, once said: “Not to have read Chomsky is to court genuine ignorance”. Rarely has this been more true than today.

With Hopes and Prospects, academic and activist Noam Chomsky has produced another indispensable critique, explaining the inner workings of world affairs.

The first half of the book is largely focused on Latin America, with updated and revised versions of lectures Chomsky gave in Chile and Venezuela in 2006 and 2008.

Chomsky points out that US state…

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Wade Allison is an academic physicist who writes about the science and safety of radiation. His main thrust is that radiation safety limits have been set irrationally high due to unrealistic fears and misunderstandings of the dangers of ionising radiation. He claims that recent evidence confirms that the dangers of low level radiation are much less than was thought earlier, and may even be beneficial in some circumstances.

Even if you disagree with where Allison takes his arguments, a large part of the book is a good, accessible…

During the Vietnam war, peace groups who invited Noam Chomsky to speak often tried to pair him with Howard Zinn. Chomsky’s stark analysis might paralyse some, but Zinn’s humour and optimism would lift people, and inspire them to go out and take action.

No slouch in the action department himself, Zinn was an active participant in the civil rights movement, managed anti-war priest Daniel Berrigan’s movements underground while he was on the run from the FBI, and was arrested numerous times for his opposition to America’s wars. In one…

This well-researched, highly readable and highly disturbing book is essential reading for anyone who has watched with increasing concern the rise of robotic warfare in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. An absorbing account of the range of technological, political and socio-cultural factors that have converged to stimulate a “paradigm shift” in the nature of warfare over the last two decades – a shift which underlies the rapidly escalating dominance of armed drones in combat – it is also a valuable outline of some of the problems that this…

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Focusing on the 1919 general strike in Seattle – the first in the US – Revolution in Seattle is a dense, journalistic account of early twentieth-century radical agitation in Washington state.

Originally published in 1964, and now republished to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 1999 “Battle of Seattle”, Harvey O’Connor’s memoir of this forgotten chapter in US history is a timely tribute to the late historian Howard Zinn’s belief in documenting “people’s history”.
As the book’s “Forward” notes, this was a time when “…

These two films, separated by 33 years (Winter Soldier was originally released in 1972; Sir, No Sir! in 2005), show how resistance to the war in Vietnam was alive and active among thousands of military personnel from the mid-1960s to the end of the war in 1975.

Both films chart the journey of over 30 young people from total acceptance of the cause of freeing Vietnam from communism, to defiant resistance and refusal to fight. They are interesting historically but their importance for today goes much deeper than that.

Sir! No…

Filmed in 2003, this DVD records a fascinating extended conversation between veteran anarchist Colin Ward and writer/film-maker Roger Deakin. Sadly both the protagonists are no longer with us, making this film especially poignant and valuable.

It’s more of an interview than a true conversation, with Deakin asking the questions and Ward speaking at length, always with energy and lucidity and barely a pause for breath.

Topics covered include Ward’s introduction to anarchism during the Second World War, involvement with Freedom…

In September 2009, the United Nations released the findings of the Goldstone report concerning Israel’s attack on Gaza in December 2008–January 2009, which killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

The 575-page inquiry noted that Israel’s offensive was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”

Gaza…

Espousing participatory democracy and direct action, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the iconic American New Left group of the early 1960s, played a key role in organising the first major demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1965.

Recognising that it was necessary to change the political and economic systems in order to stop “the seventh war from now”, it tried and failed to organise an “interracial movement of the poor” before disintegrating, destroyed by various Marxist-Leninist groups.

The bulk of this “graphic…