Insights to INCITE!
Winter Reviews
Volume: 25
Number: 1
Life Among the (not-Quite) Native Ohioans Cion by Zakes Mda Picador, 2007, 320 pages, $14 In his first novel Ways of Dying, Zakes Mda introduced readers to Toloki, a poor man living in an unnamed South African city who decides to take up mourning professionally. In exchange for coins, Toloki wanders from one funeral to…
His band ain’t playing Hail to the Chief Revival John Fogerty 2007, Fantasy Records, $17.98 John Fogerty’s material has always drawn on the mythology of the common men and women in this fair country. Whether writing about the bullfrog down by the Green River or expressing a workingman’s scorn for the rich who send the…
Humiliated Bodies, Resilient Voices by Gloria Williams Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak Edited by Marc Falkoff University of Iowa Press, 2007 84 pages, $13.95 Imagine being 14 years old when you arrive in Pakistan to learn English and study informational technology. Then imagine being arrested, tortured and taken to Guantanamo Bay as an “enemy…
Empire’s Damsels The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America by Susan Faludi Metropolitan Books, 2007 368 pages, $26 With her latest offering Susan Faludi, author of Backlash and Stiffed, draws upon her previous insights into the causes and consequences of the antifeminist backlash of the last three decades, applying them to the era…
Come with me to that star… where no one is afraid of the light Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrakhzad Translation by Sholeh Wolpe University of Arkansas Press, 2007 160 pages, $22.95 And here I am, a lonely woman on the threshold of a cold season at the dawn of realizing earth’s sullied existence and…
Tribulation on Trial The Camden 28 Directed by Anthony Giacchino 2007, First Running Features, 83 minutes On the night of August 21, 1971, a group of antiwar activists broke into the federal draft board office in Camden, N.J., armed with ladders, drills, and 12 canvas bags. Their intent was to remove and destroy Selective Service…
Before Shock and Awe Guernica and Total War By Ian Patterson Harvard University Press, 2007 208 pages, $22.95 The bombing of cities large and small, the murder and terrorization of women, children and noncombatant men did not begin on April 26, 1937, when the German Luftwaffe and subordinate Italian forces, supporting Franco in the Spanish…
A Life Disappointed Outcast By Shimon Ballas Translation by Ammiel Alcalay and Oz Shelach City Lights, 2007 308 pages, $13.95 “Relations with Iran are getting complicated.” Just one of many resonant lines in Shimon Ballas’ latest novel that brings to mind contemporary events. Written in Hebrew and recently translated into English, Outcast is the…
When they tell you I’m not a prisoner don’t believe them. They’ll have to admit it someday. When they tell you they released me don’t believe them. They’ll have to admit it’s a lie someday. When they tell you I betrayed the party don’t believe them. They’ll have to admit I was loyal someday….
Lancaster Students for a Democratic Society began in February of 2007 and has quickly grown to be a political force in conservative Lancaster County, PA. It is one of the few SDS chapters primarily made up of high school students. The chapter has focused most of its attention on ending the current occupations of Iraq…
SUPPORT THE TROOPS Since coming on board with the League in April, I’ve been meeting with peace and justice organizers across the country (including WRL locals), hearing about what’s working, what’s not, and what’s needed at the local level. One of the assessment questions I’ve been asking folks is about the role of antiwar…
Nearly 400 people joined the War Resisters League in honoring the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International at the 42nd Annual WRL Peace Awards on September 28. Held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, the program featured music by Emma’s Revolution and the Welfare Poets, readings…
NATIONAL COMMITTEE ELECTIONS The National Committee (NC), WRL’s highest decision-making body, is charged with shaping the league’s policy and direction and setting its budget. It consists of 28 members, all signatories to WRL pledge to resist all war: 20 appointed by various WRL committees and task forces and eight elected by the WRL membership as…
Photo by Cameron Lefevre.jpg AIDS ACTIVISTS RALLY FOR PREVENTION JUSTICE Showing the “missing pieces” of the HIV prevention puzzle in the United States, hundreds of activists poured into downtown streets for the Prevention Justice Mobilization (PJM) Unity Rally and March on December 4 in Atlanta, where the National HIV Prevention Conference was occurring. People from…
The great Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika, who died in 2007, wrote in her “Love Song for Words”: “Why do we fear words/when among them are words like unseen bells,/whose echo announces in our troubled lives/the coming of a period of enchanted dawn,/drenched in love, and life?… so pour us two full glasses of worlds! Tomorrow…
Mavis Staples Sings Her Own Time Mavis Staples We’ll Never Turn Back 2007, Anti Records, $18.98 Smart enough to reject a Bob Dylan marriage proposal back in the day, Mavis Staples endures. With her latest record, featuring selections from the Black Freedom Movement songbook, she cosmically plays with time—while transporting us to a bygone cultural…
The Casualties at Home In the Valley of Elah Directed by Paul Haggis 2007, Warner Independent Pictures, 120 minutes Based on actual events during the first year of this Iraq war, In the Valley of Elah is the gripping story of Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), a retired military police officer living in Tennessee, who…
How Nonviolence Protects the State By Peter Gelderloos South End Press, 2007, 182 pages, $10 The Logic of Political Violence: Lessons in Reform and Revolution By Craig Rosebraugh Arissa Media Group, 2003, 288 pages, $17.95 Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America By Ward Churchill Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 1998,…
Grace Paley’s place in the history books is hers alone, and unlikely ever to be matched. In the canon of U.S. literature, no writer has ever risen so high while compiling such a long and honorable arrest record in the cause of peace; in the history of U.S. resistance, no activist has reaped nearly as…
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