Reviews

At first sight, a book about a Christian minister’s engagement with Islam might appear to have limited value to the non-religious reader.

However, I believe, this book has something to teach all of us working for peace and justice. And in these times when the nature of Islam is so misrepresented and misunderstood, Ray Gaston’s story is little short of revolutionary.

This book is part-autobiography, as we follow Ray on his path to a greater understanding of Islam, and part-philosophy, as he ponders the nature of Christianity…

At the end of this powerful retrospective of the work of photojournalist Don McCullin, there is space for visitors to question the photographer. I wrote “How could you experience this, and not become active in opposing war?”

The photographs, mostly in his stark black-and-white style, many the subject of awards, are well-known and need few words.

If nothing else in the Imperial War Museum can persuade you of the unbearable realities of war, McCullin’s photographs surely must. The images of battle are gripping, but it is where…

This rousing film – one of a series of seven films under the heading Have You Heard from Johannesburg? – documents the successful campaigns leading to the sports boycott of apartheid South Africa in the late 1960s and ’70s.

Following the launch of the “Stop the Seventy Tour” in September 1969, Fair Play highlights the coming together, in Britain, of students, trade unionists and committed citizens in mass, direct action against the South African rugby tour.

Only a few months later a high profile campaign led to the…

I enjoyed David MacKay’s book unpicking energy issues and exploring the realities of the tough choices we face.

It’s had favourable reviews from influential quarters, including those in political power here in the UK. MacKay, a Cambridge physicist, has essentially made a book out of lots of back-of-an-envelope calculations, pulling them together to see, for example, whether potential UK renewable energy sources stack up against our energy consumption.

He’s done almost everything possibly to make it accessible, from great…

Venezuela Speaks! attempts to counter the one-dimensional focus of the Western media on president Hugo Chavez by highlighting the central role that grassroots social movements have played in pushing the Bolivarian Revolution forward.

As one activist explains: “With Chavez or without Chavez, it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

Edited by three Venezuela specialists, Venezuela Speaks! is made up of in-depth interviews with 29 radicals and activists – from women’s groups, the indigenous movement, student…

Vandana Shiva has a knack of bringing together issues we often see as separate, and linking our awareness to these connections.

In Soil Not Oil she argues that the triple crisis of the title is actually a triple opportunity – in relation to industrial farming, petroleum-based fertilisers and oil-based transportation on- and off-farm.

What better and more immediate way to reduce our CO2 emissions than to change our food habits? Shiva encourages us to power down our consumption as we power up our creativity which includes using…

Following the publication of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (“The Goldstone Report”) last September, British colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded British forces in Afghanistan in 2003, infamously told the UN Human Rights Council that Israel had done “more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone” during the 2008/2009 invasion of Gaza “than any other army in the history of warfare.”

In reality, as Norman Finkelstein shows in this meticulously-sourced polemic, “the post invasion reports of human rights…

The public debate surrounding Afghanistan has been “dominated by superficial or plainly wrong assumptions”, notes Dr Antonio Giustozzi, a researcher at the London School of Economics, in Decoding the New Taliban.

In an attempt to “expand the horizon of knowledge” about the command and control structure of the post-2001 Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, Giustozzi has enlisted the help of 14 journalists, diplomats, military officers and academics.

Due to the complexity and diversity in Afghanistan, most chapters have a specific…

What does it really mean to “demonstrate in solidarity” or “support a solidarity campaign”, or to go to a country and join a solidarity project or action?

People Power brings together some answers from those involved in international nonviolent solidarity action – supporting conscientious objectors in Turkey (War Resisters International) – as international observers or in transnational accompaniment (Peace Brigades International) – and in global solidarity and transnational campaigns (World Social Forum).

In sometimes very…

In 1969, Fred Hampton was a charismatic African-American community organiser leading the Black Panther Party in Chicago, and was on the verge of taking on a leadership role within the national Black Panther organisation. In Chicago, in just one year, Hampton had successfully organised a “free breakfast for children” programme and a free Panther health clinic. He had brokered peace between the largest gangs in the city, and moved some way towards converting them from criminality to radical community-oriented politics.

Hampton had…

Based on over 200 personal testimonies from the Imperial War Museum’s oral history collection, Voices Against War is a fascinating and lively survey of anti-war protest in the UK from 1914 to the present day.

A university lecturer and author of the bestselling Young Voices, Lyn Smith is keen to stress the complexity and range of anti-war positions held by those who have resisted their Government’s call to go to war. For example, in the first world war conscientious objectors (COs) fell into two broad categories – “absolutists” who…

Within this book, there’s a thoughtful treatise against climate change struggling to get out. It never quite makes it, which is a shame, as Alastair McIntosh has some important things to say. One of the main problems is structure. Part one deals with the science of climate change and political dilemmas; part two, with a spiritual response.

The trouble with this approach is that the book becomes neither one thing nor the other, particularly when the style veers between dense analysis and chatty thoughts.

I think McIntosh would…

In 2001 legendary non-fiction cartoonist Joe Sacco travelled to Gaza on an assignment for Harper’s magazine to report on the fate of Palestinians in the town of Khan Younis during the second Intifada.

That visit prompted him to follow up a reference he’d read many years earlier in Noam Chomsky’s book The Fateful Triangle: a short quote from a UN document concerning a massacre in the town during the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which scores of unarmed men were shot in their homes or lined-up against walls by Israeli forces.

Though…

This inspiring book draws on the practical experience of Transition Initiatives and provides all the information and inspiration needed to start a local food project. “It’s all about devising abundant, beautiful, fun and delicious food projects.”

The main part of the book is made up of all the different categories of local food projects from shared allotment and garden projects through Community Supported Agriculture Schemes to food co-operatives and school projects. Each one is presented as a “story” with helpful tips from project…

Pablo Picasso’s painting, Guernica, was shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1939 as a consciousness- and fund-raiser for the Spanish Republican cause.

Today it is back again, in tapestry form, as the seed for Goshka Macuga’s exploration of a web of connections: from a 1939 viewing “fee” of a pair of worker’s boots to the image, now hung in the UN building, being covered up during Colin Powell’s pre-war on Iraq speech. Goshka intervenes in history to give us Colin Powell – a bronze bust – and his speech in front of Guernica. She…