Donald Rooum's Wildcat cartoons have been published in Freedom Anarchist Fortnightly for longer than some Peace News readers have been tramping their ecological footprints over the planet. There are series of books available with titles such as the ABC of Bosses, Health Service Wildcat and Wildcat Strikes Again.
Rooum's work has many strengths - the clarity of the line drawings, the self-conscious and self-mocking use of stereotypes (the army general with handle-bar moustache, the porcine…
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…
This book, published in association with Médecins sans Frontiéres, lacks a precise focus, but is principally concerned with international responses to intranational conflict and the problems they pose to humanitarian organisations.
It begins with an excellent and incisive introduction by Jean-Hervé Bradol who outlines three basic types of international response: intervention, involvement and abstention. A large part of the book is dedicated to case studies illustrating each of these three basic types…
This offering from Peace Direct uses personal narratives to celebrate and give voice to a very different type of hero: individuals who have taken the frequently traumatic decision to reject the path of conflict in favour of the often more difficult but ultimately far more fulfilling route of active peace-making.
The subjects of these fifteen accounts would not characterise themselves as heroes, and it is this humility that gives the book much of its force. The stories are told with striking honesty; many of the contributors relate…
If ever there was a time for peace, it must surely be our troubled, traumatised own. And yet, if it were instigated, the fundamental question remains: who might benefit from this dreamt-of peace, and would any agreement resolve the underlying causes of conflict or merely satisfy the current global managers of economic and political power?
Given that this review is being written the day after 125 Iraqis were killed by US strikes in the Iraqi city of Samarra, while dozens died in shootings and bombings in India, the search for what we…
It was a pleasure to be given this to review - it's a book I'd want to buy if I could afford it.
Rex Weyler has written a history of a major part of this movement, assessing many of the personalities, and narrating some of the dramatic stories. (See interview p10-12.)
Lots of this has been told before, but this might be the first attempt to pull so much of this history together by someone so close to it. It is a pity it concentrates on the 1970s, though that means it gives a fascinating insight into the struggles to establish…
When a member of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, clinical psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, returns to a prison to interview, and finally to know, one of the behind-the-scenes murderers in the dreaded secret police, she faces not only a man who committed unspeakable deeds in his country, but she faces the universal questions of the nature of evil and human violence, the possibility of transformation and the human capacity for forgiveness.
The story of this psychologist and the subject of her study, death…
Most PN readers would, I hope, be at least aware of the issue of the “missing women” of India and China and the growing problem of gender imbalance in the populations of these two huge countries. The increasing use of sex-selective abortion as an apparently more socially acceptable option than female infanticide is the latest twist to this tale, the chilling use of modern medical technologies to eliminate socially and economically undesirable girl children.
As a woman and a feminist, I have always found these developments deeply…
Between 1961 and 1971 the United States dropped approximately 46 million litres of Agent Orange - a herbicide containing the highly toxic waste product dioxin - on South Vietnam. Some 20,000 villages were sprayed, affecting an estimated five million people.
In 1965 an official for the Dow Chemical Corporation wrote an internal memo in which he recognised that dioxin was “exceptionally toxic ... [with] tremendous potential for producing chloracne [a skin disorder similar to acne] and systemic injury”. “Under no circumstances may this…
April 2004 marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide, making this publication both timely and important. It uncovers a side of that terrible story largely hidden from public view. Shake Hands with the Devil is an intensely personal account, written by the head of the UN mission before and during the slaughter.
Informed that he was being posted to Rwanda, Lt General Dallaire remembers that the only information he had about the country was a photocopied page from an encyclopaedia. As commander of UN…
Contrary to its challenging title, Rethinking War and Peace has little that is new or radical to offer. It is a reasonable and readable statement of the case for war's abolition through active participation in peaceful alternatives, and anyone wholly new to the subject might find it a useful introduction. Readers of Peace News, on the other hand, will generally find themselves being told things they already know.
While there are many grounds for pessimism in the peace movement, this book makes a virtue of finding them even in places…
For hundreds of years Chechnya has been an itch on the underbelly of Russia - awkward to reach and irritatingly persistent. The most recent episodes of a shadowy and confused conflict are related in this autobiography of a Chechen surgeon who worked through the wars of the 1990s, armed only with a scalpel.
Khassan Baiev treated the wounded tirelessly and indiscriminately, faithful to the Hippocratic Oath to which the title refers and under which he had pledged to help anyone in need, regardless of nationality.
The brutality…
Many activists have taken a crash course in US history thanks to Bill Blum. In Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (2002, see http://peacenews.info/issues/2441/2441351.html ) he took us through the unvarnished history of interventions, sabotage and deceit by the US government.
Now his 1986 book on the CIA, updated in 1995, has again been updated to bring us up to the end of 2003, incorporating new material on terrorism, Afghanistan and Iraq. He…
This is a book which makes a very useful contribution to the literature which already exists about the use of atomic weapons against Japan.
Noritaka Fukami was in Nagasaki at the time that the bomb was dropped. After the bomb fell he was involved in some of the rescue work within the city. Storm Over Nagasaki is a scroll depicting the bombing, and provides a visual record of what he and others experienced at the time.
Suffering from radiation sickness, he committed suicide in 1952.
The book is divided into two main…
