Book Review

The Miseducation Of Augie Merasty

July 20, 2015 Christine Smith, www.rabble.ca Educate! Book Review, Canada, Education, History, Indigenous Peoples

By Christine Smith in Rabble - The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir might be a small book, but it carries a punch to it that all Canadians need to read and understand: a firsthand account of the impact residential schools had on Indigenous children forced to attend, told by a young boy, Joseph (Augie) Merasty, and how this experience shaped his life. Indian Residential Schools have played a long, sad and harmful history in Canada since they first opened in the 1840s until the last one closed in 1996. Merasty, one of 150,000 children taken from their families during this era, was taught to be ashamed of his family and his culture, and experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse that no child should ever have to experience.

What Are Foreign Military Bases For?

July 14, 2015 David Swanson, www.davidswanson.org Educate! Book Review, Imperialism, Torture, Wars and Militarism

By David Swanson - If you're like most people in the United States, you have a vague awareness that the U.S. military keeps lots of troops permanently stationed on foreign bases around the world. But have you ever wondered and really investigated to find out how many, and where exactly, and at what cost, and to what purpose, and in terms of what relationship with the host nations? A wonderfully researched new book, six years in the works, answers these questions in a manner you'll find engaging whether you've ever asked them or not. It's called Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Harm America and the World, by David Vine. Some 800 bases with hundreds of thousands of troops in some 70 nations, plus all kinds of other "trainers" and "non-permanent" exercises that last indefinitely, maintain an ongoing U.S. military presence around the world for a price tag of at least $100 billion a year.

Book Review: A Practical Guide To Tackling Factory Hazards

July 13, 2015 Kim Scipes, www.labornotes.org Create! Book Review, Public Health, Worker Rights and Jobs

By Kim Scipes in Labor Notes - For plenty of workers, health and safety is about as boring a subject as there is. They don’t want to hear about this “crap,” many will say—they just want to get the job done. Yet health and safety issues are as important as it gets, and a new book argues that organizers can use them to build power on the shop floor to “encourage” bosses to do the right thing. “The most important product of any factory,” the authors argue, “is the health and safety of its workers.” Production schedules and profits should come second. The comprehensive Workers’ Guide to Health and Safety, published in May, is based on 10 years of work. It’s been field-tested by workers in a number of countries. This book shows how to advance workplace health and safety from a worker-centered, pro-union, organizing perspective.

Iraqi Voices Are Screaming From Far Away

July 2, 2015 David Swanson, www.davidswanson.org Educate! Book Review, Democracy, Iraq, Wars and Militarism

By David Swanson - Iraqis were attempting the nonviolent overthrow of their dictator prior to his violent overthrow by the United States in 2003. When U.S. troops began to ease up on their liberating and democracy-spreading in 2008, and during the Arab Spring of 2011 and the years that followed, nonviolent Iraqi protest movements grew again, working for change, including the overthrow of their new Green Zone dictator. He would eventually step down, but not before imprisoning, torturing, and murdering activists -- with U.S. weapons, of course. There have been and are Iraqi movements for women's rights, labor rights, to stop dam construction on the Tigris in Turkey, to throw the last U.S. troop out of the country, to free the government from Iranian influence, and to protect Iraqi oil from foreign corporate control.

Hidden Structure Of Violence: Who Benefits From Global Violence

June 30, 2015 Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree, www.monthlyreview.org Educate! Book Review, Violence, Wars and Militarism

By Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree in Monthly Review - The Hidden Structure of Violence marshals vast amounts of evidence to examine the costs of direct violence, including military preparedness and the social reverberations of war, alongside the costs of structural violence, expressed as poverty and chronic illness. It also documents the relatively small number of people and corporations responsible for facilitating the violent status quo, whether by setting the range of permissible discussion or benefiting directly as financiers and manufacturers. The result is a stunning indictment of our violent world and a powerful critique of the ways through which violence is reproduced on a daily basis, whether at the highest levels of the state or in the deepest recesses of the mind.

Exposing Lies, Telling The Truth

June 10, 2015 Robert J. Burrowes, www.popularresistance.org Educate! Art, Book Review, Imperialism, Media, News

By Robert J. Burrowes - I have just read Andre Vltchek's new book 'Exposing Lies of the Empire'. http://badak-merah.weebly.com/exposing-lies-of-the-empire.html Let me tell you something about this book of 800 pages. Vltchek writes with passion and poetry, describing the true horror experienced by the world at large, living at the gunpoint of the imperial powers, while also describing and drawing you into a world of progress, culture and refinement that exists in some places and, so we are tantalised, might exist elsewhere too and even, perhaps, one day for us all. If you want to begin to understand Vltchek himself, you should start with the chapter headed 'Solitude of an Internationalist: Our Leningrad'.

Book Showcases FBI Efforts To Sabotage US Left

February 15, 2015 Eleanor J. Bader, www.truthout.org Educate! Book Review, FBI, Infiltration

"Typically," Heavy Radicals notes, "a local FBI agent would provide information to a 'friendly' news source on the condition that the bureau's interest in these matters be kept in the strictest confidence." Riesel, of course, was not the only "friend" at the ready. Among others, The San Francisco Examiner's Ed Montgomery served as a prominent West Coast ally. Not surprisingly, all of this happened without RU/RCP members having the faintest inkling that they had been infiltrated or were being monitored by employees of the US government. In fact, Leonard and Gallagher write that paid informants frequently rose to organizational prominence and became the most vocal celebrants of the group's "tight security." This, in turn, helped unsuspecting members relax in the assumed safety of trusted colleagues.

Saving Labor From Itself

March 21, 2014 Jon Flanders, www.jacobinmag.com Educate! Book Review, Labor, Unions

It has been Steve Early’s fate to chronicle in excruciating detail the decline of the labor empires that grew up in the flush years that followed the World War II — a task he takes up in his new book Save Our Unions: Dispatches From a Movement in Distress. With the US triumphant on the world stage and industrial rivals defeated in the wake of the war’s destruction, US labor took the CIO-generated industrial union wave to a high point of 35 percent of the workforce with union representation. While the radical edge of the 1930s labor insurgency was driven out during the McCarthy period, the ranks of union officials grew and prospered; corporations, flush with cash, bided their time, while union bureaucracies grew ever-larger.

Understanding European Movements From ’68 To 2011

February 9, 2014 Parthena Xanthopoulou-Dimitriadou, www.roarmag.org Educate! Book Review, Europe, Revolution

The last years have witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of mobilizations and grassroots movements responding to the dismantling of social and political arrangements following the momentous and ongoing financial crisis of 2008. In 2011, people took the streets across Europe to protest against socio-economic degradation, challenging the austerity policies designed and implemented under the auspices of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Cuts in public spending, wage reduction, the removal of working benefits, the abolition of collective labor agreements, the dissolution of public health systems and pension schemes, and rampant unemployment and homelessness were among the most contested issues behind the mobilizations, which soon redirected the public expression of indignation towards the entire political system, denouncing parties and challenging the very idea of representative democracy.

Capitalism Vs Democracy

January 30, 2014 Thomas B. Edsall, www.nytimes.com Educate! Book Review, Capitalism, Democracy, Finance and the Economy

Thomas Piketty’s new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,”described by one French newspaper as a “a political and theoretical bulldozer,” defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism. Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, does not stop there. He contends that capitalism’s inherent dynamic propels powerful forces that threaten democratic societies. Capitalism, according to Piketty, confronts both modern and modernizing countries with a dilemma: entrepreneurs become increasingly dominant over those who own only their own labor. In Piketty’s view, while emerging economies can defeat this logic in the near term, in the long run, “when pay setters set their own pay, there’s no limit,” unless “confiscatory tax rates” are imposed.

Book Review: Grass, Soil, Hope

January 1, 2014 Courtney White, www.carbonpilgrim.wordpress.com Create! Book Review, Climate Change, Environment, Food and Agriculture

Right now, the only possibility of large-scale removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is through plant photosynthesis and related land-based carbon sequestration activities. They include: enriching soil carbon, no-till farming, climate-friendly livestock practices, conserving natural habitat, restoring degraded watersheds and rangelands, increasing biodiversity, and producing local food. As I know from personal experience, these strategies have been demonstrated individually to be both practical and profitable. In Grass, Soil, Hope, I bundle them into an economic and ecological whole with the aim of reducing atmospheric CO2 while producing substantial co-benefits for all living things. Soil is a huge natural sink for carbon dioxide.

Activist’s Handbook: A Checklist For Change

November 5, 2013 Steve Early, www.socialpolicy.org Strategize! Activism, Book Review

Throughout the new edition of the book, Shaw does a consistently good job of categorizing, in general, what works and what doesn’t and why. For example, in his dissection of the strengths and weaknesses of the “tactical activism” of Occupy Wall Street, he praises Occupiers, far and wide, for having “the audacity to launch a national debate about income inequality that still shapes public attitudes about the nation’s commitment to economic fairness and equal opportunity for all.” Yet, despite the enduring brilliance of Occupy’s framing of the problem (aka “the 1 percent versus the 99 percent”), the movement itself became bogged down, he believes, in a defensive crouch. “Occupy’s preoccupation with preserving its public encampments reflected its shift from a proactive approach.”

Peace, Love, And Pepper Spray Book

November 5, 2013 Staff, www.peaceloveandpepperspray.com Educate! Arts, Book Review, Occupy

Peace, Love, and Pepper Spray, a new coffee table book by Emmy Award-winning journalist and photographer Amber Lyon, chronicles modern protesting in America with more than 200 photographs of activists at the heart of recent protests across the country. The book’s 12 chapters and individual activist profiles cover an array of recent protests with a focus on immigrant rights, Anonymous, women’s right to go topless, the Chicago Teacher’s Strike, online protest, attacks on press freedom, home foreclosure barricades, Keystone XL Pipeline demonstrations, Chicago NATO protests, Trayvon Martin, Anaheim police brutality and many, many more…

Activism As A Spiritual Pursuit

November 5, 2013 Pat Taub, www.pattaub.com Educate! Activism, Book Review, Spirituality

Viewing activism as sacred has broadened my perspective, making compassion and a respect for differences central in my thinking. In this respect I’ve been influenced by liberation theology as advanced by Matthew Fox, a defrocked Jesuit Priest and co-author with Adam Bucko of “Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation”–a book which calls for spirituality-infused activism. Fox cautions activists, “If we’re only acting out of anger, we reproduce the energy and momentum of destruction.” (I don’t think Fox is negating righteous indignation, which is a wake-up call for many causes, but warning against a calcified angry stance.) Fox regards community building as a soulful enterprise:

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