Reviews

Nira Yuval-Davis' Gender and Nation is presented by the author as the culmination of her work in the areas of gender and ethnic studies beginning with her work in the 1980s on gender relations in Israel and the ways they have related to the Zionist settlement project and the Israeli-Arab conflict through to the Women, Citizenship and Difference conference at the University of Greenwich in 1996.

The book is organized in six chapters ("Theorising Gender and Nation"; "Women and the Biological Reproduction of the Nation"; 'Cultural…

The US describes Colombia as harbouring the hemisphere's biggest terrorist threat. Not surprisingly, the plan it supports to solve Colombia's social ills, Plan Colombia, will have a significantly detrimental effect on the region as a whole. Both these books not only provide a coherent critique of Plan Colombia and offer alternative proposals for dealing with the drugs issue, they delve beneath Colombia as merely an exporter of cocaine or a perpetrator of terrorism and explore the political, social and economic causes of the violence that…

In this book, Danilo Zolo offers “an interpretation of the `humanitarian war' waged by nineteen NATO countries against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999”. In so doing, he paints a depressing (but perhaps unsurprising) picture of political manoeuvrings, hypocrisy and double-dealings that are enough to get the word “humanitarian” a bad name. The fact that it takes place against the background of the genuine suffering of the people of Kosova serves only to make it all even worse.

At the heart of Zolo's analysis…

With the classical meaning of a “diplomat is one who listens and reads twice”, I've been diplomatic with this book and diplomacy has paid.

I underestimated the book when I first read it and appreciated it better after going through it twice. Initially I was put off by some inaccuracies of fact and deficiencies of judgement when referring to Colombian history. Soon I came to value the usefulness of the overviews mainly for non-Colombian readers and the ability of the book to fulfil its own title.

A chapter on The Roots of…

This is a special issue of the ground-breaking anti-racist and anti-imperialist journal, an issue that focuses on the search for “Truth?” in a series of articles about several truth/reconciliation projects, from Chile to Northern Ireland.

The achievements of these organisations are examined, but also their limitations. “Let me tell you quite honestly, truth without justice is not truth; it only means the acknowledgement of what has happened.” (The wife of a Chilean “disappeared”, quoted p20). A “truth and reconciliation committee”…

The ICISS was set up by the Canadian government in 2000 to investigate and report on the “right of humanitarian intervention”, with its members being selected from a variety of backgrounds and nations.

Before preparing their report they organised a series of international discussions and commissioned a set of briefing papers from recognised experts in the field. The CD-ROM contains the papers and summaries of the discussions along with an extensive bibliography. (This supplementary volume is also available in paperback, ISBN 0 8893…

Perhaps if I had known who half the (predominantly) men in this book were before I read it, Marc Estrin's novel could have been quite irritating. Thankfully my ignorance of famous 20th Century male thinkers, scientists, inventors and so on, probably saved me!

In fact, I rather liked this book. Its main character is one Gregor Samsa - half-man, half-cockroach. Samsa is an escapee from a Kafka novel (Metamorphosis) and this is a tale which reflects on some of the last century's most significant international political events…

In his novel Slowness, Czech writer Milan Kundera makes the astute remark that we slow down to remember and speed up to forget. If this is true then, according to Norwegian Social Anthropologist Eriksen, we might be in danger of becoming an amnesiac species sooner rather than later, due to our fixation with acceleration.

His thesis here is simply and lucidly put: the exponential growth in “time-saving” communication technologies is leading paradoxically to less time being left available for the pursuits of life itself, as…

This is not normally something I would purchase out of choice, as I had never heard of the artists, but from the first play there is something intriguing about Dreams and Secrets. It becomes clear that this is not something that you can dip into and come back and listen to; it really needs to be listened to as a whole.

Much like a dream there are lots of different levels to it. And much like a secret you're never quite sure where it started or where it's going! Each track segues into the next with vocal tracks and…

Could it be that cities get the literary detectives they deserve? What does Ian Rankin's Rebus tell us about contemporary Edinburgh, or even Colin Dexter's Morse about Oxford's dreaming spires?

Well, it's time to add a new name and metropolis to the pantheon, and this guy is distinctive in that he manages to occupy an unlikely middle-ground when it comes to attitude and inclination.

Jean-Claude Izzo's complex creation, the Marseille-dwelling Inspector Montale, is a bon viveur and sensualist, but faces severe challenges to his…

If it weren't for the generous injection of black humour, this book would feel almost unbearable. There's no doubting it's a great read, full of revelatory investigation into a huge array of issues, but it's enough to bring you out in a sweat every time you pick it up, with its extensive evidence on how every corner of corporate life is riddled with systemic abuse, and every self-declaring bastion of democracy is hiding some big secrets.

Few of the bigger stories are new in themselves - Bush stealing the Presidency, US involvement…

Palestine, Palestine is an unusual creature, a film about this beautiful and terrible land which shows something of everyday life in the West Bank.

It is not a documentary as such, although it deals with real people and their day-to-day existence. It has more life and lyricism than that. But it is also grounded in reality and makes inescapable the way that the Israeli presence is not just a matter of the brutal incursions which hit the Western news but a daily challenge to the ingenuity and dignity of a people under occupation by a…

This powerful play received its first British production at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester last year. It tells, through the experiences of a small group of characters, of the pivotal events in the liberation struggle of an unnamed African state.

The beginnings of armed struggle are met by the British authorities not with dialogue but violent oppression, including the arrest of moderate leaders. These tensions are played out through the characters of Tshembe Matoseh, an African returning home from his Western education, and…

War and Peace addresses the prime question of the moment, something which has been shaping itself threateningly into a mushroom cloud over South Asia during the past few months (or should we say decades - see the interview with Anand Patwardhan on p22-23 of this issue).

Patwardhan's three hour long film is epic in its scale through its rich collage of small voices from four different countries -- India, Pakistan, US and Japan. Despite fears to the contrary, the film turned out to be a massive feel-good and a hope-inducing…

The name Arthur Wragg will no doubt be familiar to some of PN's more senior readers. He joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935, and contributed regularly to Peace News in the late 1930s. Later, he would design posters for the PPU, and his pacifism and social radicalism would inform much of his work during a career which spanned over five decades.

It is difficult now to fully appreciate the impact that Wragg's drawings would have had on contemporary audiences. Yet leafing through the pages of this excellent volume I…