Reviews

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…

Tripp York has tried to remove the academic discourse from his dusted-off master’s essay to turn it into a readable book. This means the book is now short enough to read in one sitting, but limits both the breadth of discovery and the ability to argue a point.

However, York’s definition of Christian anarchism is carefully explained and argued and as good as any one might read from Vernard Eller (a member of the Church of the Brethren and author of Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy Over the Powers (1987)) or Jacques Ellul (French…

Imagine a radical activist going through pretty much the entire publicly-available English-language literature on how to do soldiering (how to train a ground-hugging grunt), and also digesting quite a lot of the open literature on police forensics and government surveillance techniques – in order to extract the stuff that would be (or could be) useful for activists wanting to break into places and stop dastardly deeds.

Bumping Back is pretty much the result. Two randomly-selected sentences give a flavour: “Knowledge of the following…

This installation by the young, internationally-acclaimed Jerusalem-born Fast presents an original and often disturbing insight into the plight of asylum seekers and their struggle to be heard.

One film depicts an asylum seeker from a dystopian Britain seeking asylum in Africa. The preceding two films show, respectively, a dramatised interview between the artist and an asylum seeker in London, and a brief piece of original footage.

The films are five, 10 and 30 minutes in length, beginning with the shortest, and are presented…

Since setting up the Media Lens website (www.medialens.org) in 2002, David Edwards and David Cromwell have been publishing regular media alerts “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”, encouraging readers to write directly to individual journalists to take them to task.

Largely made up of edited versions of these alerts, Newspeak in the 21st Century’s central thesis is that there is “a profound, consistent bias favouring powerful interests stretching right across the media…

As a young South African lawyer, Albie Sachs defended his clients on charges brought under apartheid laws, was detained and tortured with sleep deprivation, went into exile, and lost an arm and an eye when South African security agents put a bomb in his car.

Following the end of apartheid, Sachs was appointed to the constitutional court by Nelson Mandela. This book is the fascinating story of an activist and lawyer given the opportunities, first to help write his country’s new constitution and then, as a judge on the constitutional…

These two books offer criticisms of capitalism from very different perspectives.

Shutt, a left-leaning economist, argues that the ongoing crisis within capitalism has arisen from the growing redundancy of capital since the 1970s. With too much capital sloshing around, the rich have found it increasingly hard to find investments that can deliver the profits they expect, resorting to taking high risks that make the whole edifice increasingly fragile.

Shutt attacks the laissez-faire prospectus, showing that state power and…

In 2004 a group of fundamentalist Christians sitting on a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, voted to make their students “aware of… other theories of evolution, including, but not limited to, intelligent design” – creationism’s latest Trojan horse.

Eleven committed parents – including a Girl Scout leader, a devout Catholic and a physics teacher who taught summer Bible school – decided to take a stand, and sued the board for violation of their first amendment rights (“separation of church and state”), whilst simultaneously mounting…

This Handbook has been put together by an international committee with the aim of creating a useful tool for those working for social change. However, unlike many similar books birthed in British or North American activist movements, this one is written from a global perspective and is all the richer for it, providing a broader view of both how nonviolent actions can be used and the type of people who are involved in such activism.

Written in a clear and succinct style, it’s a worthwhile read for all those involved in nonviolent…

Between the summer of 1918 and the following spring about 230,000 people died in Britain from a deadly strain of influenza, popularly called Spanish Flu. The toll worldwide may have been as high as 100 million. This book describes the pandemic in Britain making use of unpublished testimonies of survivors and the memoirs of doctors, soldiers, and civil servants.

The title comes from a rhyme sung by children at the time: “I had a little bird / Its name was Enza / I opened the window / And in-flu-enza”. One theme of the book is that…

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia and embarked on a four-year reign of terror and genocide. During this period, over 14,000 so-called “traitors” were processed through the secret prison S-21 set in a former school, with confessions extracted under torture. As part of the process, captives were photographed prior to execution.

S-27 is a play inspired by these real events. May’s job is to take the photographs. We follow her as she begins to question what she is doing, and her humanity begins to re-assert itself,…

Just over a year ago (PN 2497), we suggested there was a convergence of views of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X in their later years, in particular their growing convictions that overcoming class oppression was central to black liberation.

We quoted King in 1966: “something is wrong with capitalism… there must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move towards a Democratic Socialism”; and 1967: “capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves…. We must recognize that the problems of…

“At last a book on conscientious objection to military service from the point of view of contemporary objectors. It expresses the critique objection poses to patriarchy and social militarization and firmly places objection in the context of struggle for social transformation” – that’s my enthusiastic and heartfelt endorsement on the back cover of this book.

It is absolutely genuine – and not just because I’m friendly with one of the editors and some of the contributors, or because I was appalled by a certain anthology that I couldn’…

Professor Peter Hennessy is a tremendously well-connected insider, who has over the years lifted the lid on Whitehall in a way that no other historian has managed. His latest book Cabinets and the Bomb is perhaps the ultimate in revelation, in that it reproduces (photographically) top secret cabinet documents relating to the most sensitive topic in British politics: the British nuclear arsenal.

62 documents from 1940 to 2007 are presented (often in full), along with explanatory text, a very useful 14-page chronology, and two brief…

This amazing book is a political treatise, personal journal, lively commentary, an invaluable history and a guidebook to sustained activism, all in one volume. This is a work to be read and consulted for many years.

In 2005 activist Angie Zelter and her friends contemplated the weakening of the peace movement and its lack of energy. Instead of moaning and hand-wringing they created an ambitious plan to galvanise British activists. They came up with the idea to blockade Faslane in Scotland for 365 days with 100 blockaders at the gates…