Book Reviews
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Review
Solidarity and Responsibility
The contemporary migrant justice movement has done an admirable job educating sectors of the Left and sustaining struggles to address the concerns of migrant workers. Grappling with questions of racism, workers’ rights, imperialism and gender oppression, the migrant justice movement has encouraged…
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Review
A Tool Against Apartheid
It is far too easy for those of us on the left to respond to a piece of political writing by fixating on what we feel it lacks. This often means that instead of critiquing from a place of respect and deep listening, we compose itemized lists of real or imagined political shortcomings and fail to lea…
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Review
Fighting the Co-optation of Resistance
The Revolution will not be Funded is a collection of 16 essays from activists and scholars that deals with the contradictions of operating within the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), a system that has rapidly come to characterize the organization of civil society. The NPIC has been characterize…
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Review
Toward Autonomous Feminist Politics
Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology came out in October 2006. Along with The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, (see review in this issue), this book offers us the kind of fierce, sharp analysis we need for doing meaningful political work. Both books were c…
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Review
Of Capital and Compromise
The brilliance of Naomi Klein’s latest work, The Shock Doctrine, lies in its near boundless applicability. Rather than merely offering a coherent narrative to explain the apparent incoherence of the politics of occupied Iraq – her original objective, which itself is no simple task – the framew…
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Review
Getting Over Guilt
How can toward activists move from a cycle of guilt and inaction over racism to developing anti-racist politics that effectively challenge white supremacy in Canada? Taking Responsibility, Taking Direction: White Anti-Racism in Canada is a timely and critical look at the anti-racist politics of ‘t…
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Review
Local and Organic
In Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, bell hooks and Amelia Mesa-Bains discuss critical perspectives on the social conditions of African and Latin American communities in the United States. Homegrown takes up issues related to multiculturalism, art, pedagogy, socio-economic oppression, resistanc…
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Review
Guilty Indulgences
I read Inga Muscio’s first book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence a few years ago when I wasn’t really in the mood for a “love the cunt” diatribe. I was never one to look lovingly at my own cunt while making vagina cookies for the annual showing of the Vagina Monologues. But the reason I l…
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Review
After the Storm
Sam Green’s 2005 Academy Award nominated documentary The Weather Underground brought the armed struggle organization of the same name to film festivals and theatres across North America. With Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity, Dan Berger provides us with th…
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Review
The Sociology of Confrontation
It is perhaps Marx’s most oft-quoted piece of wisdom – that while the philosophers had interpreted the world, the point was to change it. Marx’s words were never intended to give the impression, however, that we must choose between understanding the world and changing it; both are absolutely n…
