Reviews

Written in the wake of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Vicky Osterweil’s central argument is that looting and rioting are positive actions, which ‘in most instances… transform and build a nascent moment into a movement’. 

Unserious and incurious, In Defense of Looting won’t change the minds of seasoned peace activists though, worryingly, it might influence those who are in the process of forming their views on protest and political change.

Osterweil maintains that looting makes ‘day-to-day life easier by…

The First World War was the first mechanised, industrialised, chemicalised war and the founding catastrophe of the 20th century. It led to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the rise of Hitler and the Second World War, the Cold War, and much more. 

Conscientious objectors (COs) have been called the shock troops of dissent in the First World War, and they were on the right side of history. 

Cyril Pearce’s magnificent new book about the men who refused to fight on grounds of conscience is surely now the definitive historical work…

When it published it’s landmark 2018 report on ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C’ the UN’s climate change body, the IPCC, noted that limiting global warming to 1.5°C – the stretch goal of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement - ‘would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’.

In his latest utopian novel – part of his longtime project to try and populate the …

Examining over 20 years of UK press coverage of Russia since Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, Russia and the Media shows how Russophobia has remained a key feature of the UK media since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Beginning with a useful review of the role the Western media played in shaping our understanding of the Soviet Union in the 20th century, McLaughlin first outlines the construction of an ‘enemy image’. This is the ‘simplistic binary opposition of good and evil’ that gave birth to such terms as ‘the Bolshevik…

I’ve reviewed two other Greenham-related memoirs for PN: Juley Howard’s Righteous Anger (PN 2616 – 2617) and Charlie Kiss’s A New Man (PN 2636 – 2637). Both of those authors literally ‘grew up’ at Greenham Common – arriving there aged 16, soon after the camp formed in September 1981.

By contrast, Stephanie Davies grew up in an idyllic Hampshire village, and was in her early twenties before she decided to end a conventional heterosexual life and join the Peace Camp.

Unlike Righteous Anger…

Pope Francis, in his 2015 address to the US congress, listed Dorothy Day alongside Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Day founded the Catholic Worker in 1930s New York with a weekly newspaper and a shelter for destitute men and women. The movement continues to this day as a collection of over 200 communities, mostly in the US, who live a simple lifestyle in community, serve the poor, and resist war and social injustice. As someone deeply involved in the Catholic Worker movement myself, I have so far relied on Day’s autobiographical…

A product of the Media Reform Coalition – a group of academics, activists and journalists working for progressive media reform in the UK – The Media Manifesto is a tightly-argued, inspiring call to action.

One of the book’s central arguments is that the misinformation underpinning developments like the rise of Trump, and the media’s failure to adequately challenge power, shouldn’t – as many liberals would have you believe – be blamed solely on fringe ‘fake news’ elements and the right-wing press. All this actually ‘reflects…

I wanted to read this book after reading the chapter that appeared in the Guardian: ‘Men Who Avoid Women’.

It explained that there is now a whole cult (‘Men Going Their Own Way’ or MGTOW) centred around avoiding women, to a greater or lesser extent.

Some just avoid any close contact (think US vice-president Mike Pence, who says he will never eat a meal alone with a woman who is not his wife). Others prefer to go further and go completely ‘off grid’.

Well, I thought, perhaps that’s just as well. Who would want…

In this expanded edition of his 2005 book The Monster at Our Door (the ‘monster’ being a deadly influenza pandemic), renowned historian Mike Davis critically surveys the scientific roots of COVID-19, as well as the political, economic, social and ecological conditions that affected its rise.

From the outset, Davis highlights what few governments and corporate media commentators dare admit: that COVID-19 and its various predecessors (including SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV), as well as the scores of influenza viruses that have…

Things seemed quiet on the Iran front for a few months, but they might be about to heat up.

US president Donald Trump tweeted on 14 September: ‘Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!’

Whatever happens in the next few days, Iran and the US seem still to be on course for more confrontation.... Here’s a round-up review of books about Iran.

If you want an activist-friendly, easy-to-read backgrounder that will give you a…

This book is the result of a five-month journey Johny Pitts made through Europe investigating the concept of ‘Afropean’ – that is, both African and European – culture. Travelling with a backpack, notebook and camera, Pitts followed in the steps of Caryl Phillips’s 1987 travelogue, The European Tribe, which effectively reversed the black gaze onto white Europeans.

Here, Pitts flips the concept on its head, specifically investigating black Europe in the 21st century. Each chapter focuses on a stopover: Sheffield, Paris,…

The UK immigration debate, an important issue in the Brexit referendum and recent elections, has distinctly altered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public opinion now realises the huge debt owed to migrant workers keeping us safe, from doctors to bus drivers and shop assistants. In one recent poll, 62 percent of people supported offering automatic British citizenship to care workers and roughly half supported the same offer for supermarket workers, agricultural workers and delivery drivers.

In this book, academic Maya Goodfellow…

The basic argument of this book is very simple. Contrary to the ‘persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish’, Dutch author Rutger Bregman argues that ‘most people, deep down, are pretty decent.’

The assumption of human selfishness underpins huge portions of mainstream political and economic thinking, including the influential veneer theory – ‘the notion that civilisation is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation’. Bregman believes the opposite to be true: ‘It’s when crisis hits……

Is the pursuit of equality essential to democracy or its mortal enemy? And if democracies are governed (as the preamble to the United States constitution suggests) by ‘we the people’, who gets to be part of that ‘we’? Would choosing our politicians by lot (as happened in Ancient Greece) actually be more democratic than voting?

These are just a few of the questions tackled by the activist and film-maker Astra Taylor in her latest book: ‘an invitation to think about the word democracy from various angles, looking back through…

Currently writing for the Independent and the London Review of Books, Patrick Cockburn is one of the most experienced foreign correspondents working in the Middle East today.

His latest book is largely made up of short-form reportage based on writings and diary entries at the time of the events being covered, alongside some contextualising retrospective explanation.

Covering the first term of the Trump administration, which Cockburn argues has been populated by an unusually high number of dangerous people,…