Reviews

In December 1994, days after the first modern invasion of Chechnya by Russian forces, Time magazine wrote, “Unless someone backs down, Moscow's advance into Chechnya threatens to start a guerrilla war that could wreck Yeltsin's presidency or end Russian democracy.”

Yeltsin is long gone, and so now, following the recent re-election of President Putin, with the attendant, and embarrassingly muted, concerns about it perhaps not being entirely free and fair, is an ideal time to revisit the events of what became known as the First…

Teachers of citizenship courses who wish to explore the topic of war and peace with their students will find a new short video, War No More, invaluable.

It is suitable for year ten and year eleven students, and is accompanied by a booklet of useful background information on each of the main topics, well thought out discussion points to take up with students and lists of further sources of information. The printed information is intended for free photocopying.

Topics include: how nonviolence is the normal mode of…

It may not be quite as informative as the tomes normally scrutinised on these pages; it may be almost twelve years old; and yes, it may only bear a tangential, titular connection to the sea, but this recording of Bill Hicks from his home town of Austin, Texas, is still required listening.

Many of the names have changed but, almost exactly a decade after Hicks' death from pancreatic cancer, the pantomimes of popular culture and politics which define our public life are essentially the same as they were when he was tearing into them…

I've never reviewed a book before after reading just the introduction. However, I fully recommend this book on the basis of its impact on the person who now has my copy, my partner Yolanda. She teaches 12-14-year-olds in one of those schools that everybody knows is simply not coping - failing its pupils educationally, but also not coping with all the social problems dumped on it in its massified urban environment.

The day after I showed her the book, Yolanda suggested that she do a Spanish translation. (“But it's 200+ pages,” I said…

As the blurb to this sometimes excellent book goes, “by 2025 nearly two billion people will live in regions experiencing absolute water scarcity”.

Water, as some prescient reports from the UN and NGOs are starting to point out, will be the resource over which our future wars will break out. As the key to life, we've seen glimpses of a world in which water is seriously scarce, in African famines and Asian and American dust bowls; if the fight for oil is vicious, what might happen if we're competing for the most fundamental necessity…

In a somewhat eccentric version of a road movie, Human Shields follows the 25 people who left England on double decker buses on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

Featuring plenty of interviews with the “shields”, the film shows some of the tensions and anxieties that inevitably began to unfold. Apart from a few admirable exceptions, the voices that we hear at the end of the film are not the same as those we heard at the beginning, illustrating how it was not necessarily those who spoke the loudest that were the most effective at…

With even the Pentagon now facing up to the reality of the threat of climate change, we might spare a thought or two for those who are likely to first feel its effects. The people of Tuvalu may have the unhappy distinction of becoming the world's first climate-change refugees. Trouble in Paradise is a snapshot of their increasingly precarious life.

The group of Pacific islands known as Tuvalu constitute the world's second smallest nation, after the Vatican. Its 11,000 inhabitants are spread across nine islands whose surface area is…

High Tide is the result of three years spent travelling the world in search of evidence that climate change is taking place now.

Lynas's travels include the experience of ducking England's increasingly excessive downpours; surveying the damage of melting permafrost whilst gathering local opinion on the oil industry in “baked” Alaska; and sealing all windows as unprecedented dust storms whirl in China.

Alongside excellent photos, Lynas's stories show that climate change is already having a considerable impact…

This book - “neither a lament nor a cheap forecast of doom” - is written in a kind of discursive hand-wringing fashion much loved by American journalists of the “left” (Harpers, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation), full of picture portraits standing for large (hush at the term) economic forces, local colour and exotic details. On the right subject, it works very well (see McKibben's The End of Nature, or Hertsgaard's Earth Odyssey). This case is less clear-cut.

It opens with a quick overview of the history of “…

Any TNI production merits close attention, and this handsomely produced, tightly argued and informative briefing is no exception.

As stated in the introduction;

”The Kyoto Protocol has begun laying the foundation for a completely new global marketplace in greenhouse gases. Six gases... will be traded interchangeably in the brokerage houses and trading floors of the world markets. These `environmental markets' are being left to the private sector and neo-liberal government institutions to design with little or no public…

Tired of the tedious and pitifully one-dimensional debates on the Iraq war that dominate the mainstream media? Got a sneaking suspicion that Tony Bliar may not be being entirely honest with us over WMD? Or simply want your convictions backed up with a wide range of well-researched and diverse articles? Buy this book. Despite the admission at the start that it was “produced at some speed”, it really is a quality little number.

It kicks off (after a typically sarky foreword from comedian Mark Thomas and a trenchant intro by David…

OK - I confess, I am a Neal Stephenson fan (the sole purpose of my visits to bookshops at the moment is to ask whether his latest novel - Quicksilver - is out in paperback yet!). Before I stumbled across Zodiac I had already read his three other (predominantly sci-fi - sometimes called cyberpunk) novels and been entertained, intrigued and in the case of his epic - Cryptonomicon - been fascinated.

Zodiac is a great read, but in style and content the book is quite different from his others…

Few people know that Canada provided most of the uranium for the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Even fewer know the devastating effect that the uranium ore extraction had on the Dene people of Great Bear Lake.

Peter Blow travelled to the north to record this story. White men came to the Dene land and found the “money rock”, as the residents called it. In the 1940s they started mining it, using local people for labour. At the same time the Dene gave them caribou, moose and fish. The hospitable…

The blurb on the back of this book augurs well. “In the aftermath of 9/11, America has been haunted by one question: Why do they hate us?” Perhaps, one thinks, some intelligent discussion by a leading US commentator (Pintak is a veteran journalist who has reported on the Middle East for many of the big names of the international English-language media) of why the USA has become such a symbol of oppression for so many. Progression to the next few sentences reveals that such hopes may be premature.

This book - a kind of memoir of the…

One of the stickiest problems for individuals and organisations trying to engage with the horror that is the conflict between Israel and Palestine is the issue of antiSemitism. It lurks as a spectre of guilt for those coming to the topic without a “legitimate” interest, ie being Jewish or Palestinian. And it is hurled at anyone who dares to criticise the state of Israel by those who support any of that state's actions, however bloody.

This little book - hardly more than a pamphlet - is a collection of articles and essays by writers…