Reviews

Many Peace News readers will have written polite(!) letters to their MPs and various ministers.

Usually a reply comes, written in mandarin, full of comforting phrases, often regretting that such and such a question could “only be answered at disproportionate cost”. A waste, perhaps, of time and postage, with no satisfaction. What if, though, you stopped being polite to the criminals who run the show? Kevin Wicker has found out, receiving a few anodyne replies and even fewer (im)proper counter-attacks.

Compilations of…

James Pettifer has written and spoken about the Balkans for the likes of The Times and Wall Street Journal for many years. This point is important to make from the start, because when he speaks or writes he does so with both clarity and authority, qualities that many other commentators who deal with the region do not have.

The Balkans are not the most straightforward part of the world, as anyone who follows affairs there knows, and so it is an enormous pleasure to at last be able to read Pettifer's account of the years he spent…

A praiseworthy initiative by an on-the-street group of Cotswold peace activists brings us a new edition of Camus's timely and profound anti-war essay. A world famous French essayist and playwright, Camus first contributed his assessment of the world outlook in 1946 to the Parisian resistance newspaper, Combat, to which he had been an underground contributor during the Nazi occupation.

The New York magazine Liberation, the foremost US advocate of nonviolence during the Martin Luther King era, published a translation…

Chechnya is a war that was never especially popular in the West. Such is the paucity of news coming out of that destroyed place that those who may once have been aware of the violence there could be forgiven for thinking that it is over.

Since 2001, when Putin was welcomed by America as a valuable ally in the “war on terror”, it seems we are told that anything that happens in Chechnya is just a part of this struggle against those set on destroying our way of life. The only time that Chechens are newsworthy is during shocking events…

This collection of essays and speeches by India's award winning writer ranges across the world on many important issues from globalisation to AIDS.

Roy's acceptance speech for the USA Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom urges her US audience to remember their history of brave resistance. She speaks as “a subject of the American Empire” when she says the change has to begin in America. She calls on its citizens and says, “The only institution more powerful than the US government is American civil society.”

In “When the Saints Go…

The British literary scene is pretty infatuated with English language writing by Indians and the Asian diaspora. Figures such as Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie are established icons, and newer names like Monica Ali have massive sales. Black British writers of Afro-Caribbean descent are also widely known, despite the discrimination they still face in getting published.

With one or two prominent exceptions, such as Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka, African writers are much less widely known in the UK. This compilation of poetry and…

This volume sets out to demonstrate that we are now living in what the editors refer to as a “new age of Empire”, which the book argues began with wars of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of being the start of a world in which global co-operation ensures advancement and prosperity for all people, globalisation is actually responsible for the increased instability that threatens ever-greater numbers of people.

A collection of original and rigorous pieces by nine prominent opponents of globalisation from five continents,…

Our wondrous Western Civilisation, with its self-image of progress, rationality and human rights has, over the last hundred years, become a brutal glutton for oil. This much should be obvious to everyone. What isn't so obvious - but is made so in this short and punchy booklet produced by three campaigning groups - is the price paid by western workers, citizens of Majority World countries and the biosphere itself.

It moves swiftly (two pages per topic) through oil and conflict, repressive regimes, oil and development (“The Midas…

This multifunction CD from the Peace Pledge Union uses a browser based system for navigating through the material.

Contents are divided into nine sections, including: quotations; racialism; war and peace; civil disobedience; the movement & black power; violence & nonviolence.

The disc also includes sources and a comment on the famous “I have a dream” speech and lists books by and about King. It also offers speeches - in print and with some video and audio extracts - plus teaching and study resources.

Finally,…

Using a single entity or idea to tell a wider story has been a saleable strategy for popular historians since Longitude became such a resounding hit. People expecting something similar in Joe Sherman’s Gasp: the Swift and Terrible Beauty of the Air may well start out by being a little disappointed. Sherman is an excellent writer, and the book’s first half carries an impressive array of facts and anecdotes. However, their assembly is as formless as their subject. In this exploration of our dependency on this much-damaged basis for life, he…

The fate of those brave men who deserted the German army during the Nazi dictatorship, and what became of them after WW2, is something which few people know much about. That these circa 20,000 deserters were either shot, or placed in labour battalions was bad enough. Yet having been branded with a “criminal record” for their war resistance, they suffered more fiscal, social, and employment discrimination once they were back within civilian society. As former “criminals” they were restricted in the kind of employment they could undertake and…

In one of many memorable scenes in his new book, Christian Parenti asks a doctor in Ramadi, Iraq, whether he sees many children with symptoms related to possible radiation poisoning – a potential legacy of depleted-uranium weapons used by US forces in 1991 and 2004. “I cannot answer,” the doctor replies. “Why not?” Parenti asks. After a long pause the doctor finally offers a coded apology: “This is the freedom,” he explains. “Ah, the freedom … [w]e have the gas-line freedom, the looting freedom, the killing freedom, the rape freedom … I don…

Imagine Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Nike as real people. This is how The Corporation – the latest political documentary to hit our cinema screens – begins. In taking a look at the psychological profile of a modern day corporation – its self-interested nature, its inability to feel guilt and its uncaring stance – the film reveals that our favourite brands fit precisely the medical definition of a psychopath. Unfortunately, as the documentary explains, under today’s laws, a corporation is a person. It has all the rights and freedoms of…

This useful summary and overview is part of a series of beginner's guides published by Oneworld. I'd like to see the others also - on Genetics, PalestineIsrael and particularly Postmodernism, a subject on which I shall always be a beginner.

Tormey presents a well-organised schematic look at the modern anti-capitalist movement in recent years. He believes that the last five years since WTO Seattle in 1999 calls for a redefinition of anti-capitalist movements - essentially the hopeful and forward-looking strategy that has developed…

Few novels are reviewed in Peace News, but then few novelists have the anti-war commitment of Maggie Helwig, a PN contributor, Woman in Black and former member of the WRI Council. This novel, however, is not an anti-war tract but an enthralling work of imagination that gains much of its power from Maggie's serious and multi-angled approach to the reality of war.

The story is set at the false turn of the millennium (remember the panic about y2k chaos?) when the journalistic circus has moved on from Bosnia leaving…