One No, Many Yeses
Paul Kingsnorth

Kingsnorth has the repetitive habit of ending every other paragraph with a short, romantically revolutionary phrase, along the lines of: What Kalle Lasn calls the second American Revolution - a struggle to decommodify The People
- appears to have begun.

These little passages, as unnecessary as they are unrealistic, infest the entire text and are indicative of the overall problem that rather than a book of any insight, he has written a champagne socialist's travel guide.

Apparently aiming his work at the younger, idealist members of the anti-capitalist movement, Kingsnorth travelled across five continents, talking to revolutionaries and reformists, staying briefly with them and documenting what they thought their parts of the anti-globalisation movement were all about.

Alongside the obligatory statistics on world hunger, poverty, and the disparity of wealth, he offers an appraisal - one which is already becoming out of date - of where it's all going and where it all came from.

Unfortunately Kingsnorth fails as a historian, writing vapid, misleading backgrounds on the World Social Forum, Seattle, Genoa, and the history of struggle itself.

He fails as a theoretician, spouting revolutionary jargon while spending most of the last chapter of his book calling for a relatively timid reform of some existing institutions, rather than truly challenge the power structures backing their inhumanity.

He certainly fails as an analyst of what he has seen, offering only trite and patronising sympathy with third and second world poverty from his high edifice as a worldly-wise westerner.

He sidelines anarchism, happily talking about the violence of the black blocs, while mentioning people he likes as those who 'claim' to be anarchists. As he talks admiringly about the non-hierarchical basis of the anti-globalisation movement, this airbrushing forms a large black hole in One No, many Yeses' makeup.

Where his work succeeds, and importantly so, is as a source of useful information and as a series of journalistic case studies.

He has a knack of getting hold of interesting activists throughout his travels. He has an impressive network of contacts and no small amount of bravery in tracking down people who have been on the run for years in countries with extremely repressive regimes.

There are some interesting insights from the people he talks to, though Kingsnorth himself has almost no merit when trying to translate those words into his world view.

Although his research seems questionable, particularly with regards to how the Seattle riots functioned, on the assumption the people he is talking to have explained their situations to him, the background on countries such as South Africa and particularly Papua are invaluable for the stark illustrations they present of how some aspects of capitalism work, and can be overcome.

What kept me reading was the volume of firsthand sources he found, and the information they gave him, but don't expect a 'gripping, engaging and inspiring' (according to George Monbiot) classic.

RR

Chiva
A Village takes on the Global Heroin Trade
Chellis Glendinning

The dragon is an important symbol here. It has associations of several kinds with opium and with heroin. It also has associations with how humans relate to the world around them. Chiva is the story of a village and how that village came to chase the dragon and then embrace it. Chellis Glendinning writes:

'The result is a battle: between human and nature, intellect and feeling, refined and gross, righteous and enemy - and in the world of illicit substances, with Archangel Michael brandishing His sword for law and order against the fiery antagonist'

Glendinning puts the dragon back on its lofty pedestal among the people, so this is a story about healing and specifically about the healing process. The story of heroin is also the story of colonization, 'of generations of tribal and land-based peoples in India, Turkey, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, the Andes and Mexico'. Likewise the healing is the story of decolonization and a return to a communal land-based culture.

RA

Chellis Glendinning is interviewed in BLUE

Without Blood
Alessandro Baricco

Vengeance is a human emotion as old as the species. But it is also human to forgive, to stop or to look back not in anger but in sorrow and say enough, no more, there is another way. Revenge and redemption are the two sides of the same coin, we are told. If we survive and when we are older we see the futility of it all.

Alessandro Baricco's Without Blood, delicately translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, has been described as a fable, as a book rooted in the European literary tradition, a story about damage and forgiveness. At first this is what Baricco's short novel seems to be about, a lifelong journey towards the satisfying moment of vengeance. Until that moment comes and the reader begins to realise that the author has a different design. It comes on the last page and it is worth waiting for. Of course Baricco's denouement would not have worked if the novel had been longer but it works because his beautifully crafted prose is both minimalist and visual.

Without Blood proves that literature is not dead, at least not on the European mainland where the weight of good storytelling bears down on the cultures of a continent still healing itself after centuries of conflict.

RA

Outgrowing the Earth
Lester R Brown

Lester Brown has been stating the obvious for so long now he is beginning to sound boring. By his own admission he has been involved in "some 50 titles". Many of these titles have been translated into other languages, up to 40 and as many as 28, which is the number of publishers putting out the State of the World annual Brown started back in 1983.

Brown has since left the Worldwatch Institute, the authors of the State of the World and Vital Signs annuals, and founded the Earth Policy Institute, which is now producing books that are aimed specifically at policy makers.

Because Brown states the obvious he has been described by the Washington Post as "one of the world's most influential thinkers", yet somehow this thinking he does is still not enough to convince the policy makers of the world that they need to read what Brown is thinking about.

And what he is thinking about is a world that is nearing collapse. Water tables are falling while temperatures are rising making it harder than ever to grow food for a global population that is, quite simply, "outgrowing the earth". Brown is looking for strong leadership to save the planet because he fears we no longer have food security.

The problem is that Brown is not the only thinker who needs to be listened to. There is a young generation out there that understands the meaning of the slogan, Food Not Bombs, who cannot understand why it is a crime to provide food for people and not a crime to kill thousands in the name of home security.

RA

Arguments Against G8
Gill Hubbard & David Miller (Eds)

Aimed at Britain's neo-liberals rather than a general audience, Arguments Against G8 indicts the usual suspects, the men who lead the G8 group of nations - Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States. It has been compiled by two academics, David Miller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Strathclyde, who is also a co-founder of the media monitor Spinwatch, and by Gill Hubbard, a member of Globalise Resistance Scotland and G8 Alternatives.

It features the usual western hemisphere neo-liberal commentators, notably Noam Chomsky, Susan George and George Monbiot, but significantly it features essays by Haidi Giuliani (the 61 year old mother of Carlo, murdered by police in Genoa on 20 July 2001 at a time of protests against a previous summit), Bob Crow (a former London Underground rail worker and now General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers), Tommy Sheridan (Scottish Socialist Party member of the Scottish Parliament) and Salma Yaqoob (chair of Birmingham's Stop the War Coalition and a member of Respect).

The essays by Giuliani (on Genoa), Crow (on Privatisation and workers' rights), Sheridan (on Poverty) and Yaqoob (on Racism, Asylum and Immigration) are worth the price of the book because they reflect opinions not heard among the neo-liberal revisionists of Western Civilisation and particularly in the consumer-led, hierarchical British media. The likes of Chomsky, George and significantly Monbiot are frequently heard in the neo-liberal British media, not least of all in The Guardian, which claims an authoritarian position on all the movements struggling to have their voices heard on the issues of globalisation, war, corporate power, democracy, climate change, trade, food security, racism, immigration, privatisation, workers' rights, poverty, debt, health and where we go from here - all discussed by the authors Miller and Hubbard have brought together in this book.

Media is of course a key issue in the struggle against the power of the G8 and their corporate allies. Miller's Spinwatch purports to "provide public interest research and reporting on corporate and government public relations and propaganda", an age-old hobby in Britain that has never made any kind of dent on the way Britain's media functions.

In their introduction, Barbarism Inc, the editors accuse Britain of failing to fulfil its ecological and social obligations to the rest of the world and criticise its government, soon to be tested in the polls, for its role in the so-called "war against terror" despite opposition from the general population against the war. But this book is not just about Britain's neo-liberal society and those who would seek to change it to their social advantage, it is about the G8 and why these countries abuse their power. And, if we are to believe Miller and Hubbard, there will be a "massive" mobilisation in Scotland in the summer of 2005 against that abuse.

RA

Spinning Tales, Weaving Hope
Stories, Storytelling and Activities for Peace, Justice and the Environment
Ed Brody, Jay Goldspinner, Katie Green, Rona Leventhal & John Porcino of The Stories for World Change Network (Eds), Lahri Bond (Illustrator)

The role of imagination, of storytelling, of song and ballad has never been more relevant in the world today as our lives become atomised and removed from the security and wisdom of the extended community. Many societies around the world - in the western as well as the southern and eastern hemispheres - have found a void in their midst as their young flee from land-based communities into the urban environments to seek work. Yet despite this fragmentation of community, of family, of close knit communal life, there are signs that the tradition and art of storytelling is coming back, with the primary focus of healing as well as the essential function of passing wisdom from the elders to the youngers. Macroom in west Cork in southern Ireland once had a rich tradition of song, ballad and storytelling.

Throughout the 1990s, as the country's elites embraced globalisation and the population sought out personal debt to service consumerist addictions, Macroom's young gradually re-discovered storytelling. Now it is flourishing again, as it is in many communities around the world.

This book, first published in 1992 - becoming a sought-after classic in the schoolroom and among activists who understand why stories touch the soul, is a digest of stories (29 in all) with accompanying "follow-up activities". They are aimed at children but will and should appeal to "adult children". They concern life and life's impact on our lives. At heart they are about wisdom and the oral tradition of communication, something that has been gradually dying out in the world of reality tv, sound bites and speech. This book is proof that, in the USA at least, the art of storytelling is not dead.

RA