Jack McDevitt - Engines of God

"Archaeologists in Space" would be a fairly accurate title for this neat little science fiction novel. In Jack McDevitt's 1996 novel we encounter an Earth wrecked by global warming and war; and a humankind struggling for a future. The universe that they hope to escape into though is surprisingly devoid of very much intelligent life. Which is surprising because the galaxy is littered with the artifacts and remains of long dead civilisations.

In an effort to understand this future archaeologists explore in much the same way that archaeologists today examine artifacts, the remains, cities and monuments of these long dead civilisations.

Principle amongst the extinct aliens are the "monument makers" who have left gigantic monuments amongst the stars, often near the remains of other civilisations. These monuments appear to serve no purpose and the future scientists scratch their heads and speculate about the meaning of the inscriptions and buildings in the same way that their fore-fathers did standing on the Giza plateau.

Of course archaeology rarely makes for exciting space based drama. We're offered some of this as the scientists race to understand a vital new clue before the planet it is on is destroyed by other scientists trying to terraform the planet for future habitation by humans fleeing the dying Earth.

Further excitement is provided as the scientists gradually start to work out that all the civilisations appear to have suffered destructive events in the past with surprising patterns and they get marooned in space in a solar system filled with planet sized radio telescopes.

McDevitt has produced a rather exciting vision of the future, interestingly grasping the nettle of climate change and environmental catastrophe before it was popular for SF writers. To combine that with space ships and archaeology makes this book almost to exciting to read for this particular reviewer.

Steven Mithen - The Singing Neanderthals; The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body

Quite early on in the reading of this book, it becomes clear that just how humans communicate, how language developed and how our minds work are matters that keep specialist scientists arguing late into the night.

Steven Mithen's excellent introduction to the debates around these matters does a good job of introducing the basic ideas to an audience of non-specialists. At almost roller-coaster speed, we learn basic brain science, how babies use language, which parts of the mind are responsible for music and language, why we might have emotions and so on.

Mithen's central theory is one that I suspect is much more controversial though. He argues that music and I mean music in all it's forms - singing, rhythm, chanting and so on, formed a much more important part of the development of the human mind. He looks at how other apes react to music, the inter-relation between music and language, and how babies develop the capacity for speech.

I must admit to finding it all a little confusing. Mithen has an easy style, but the book ends up being, in my mind, a collection of fascinating anecdotes and nuggets of information, but I felt his general argument got lost in amongst it all.

Fot instance, I was fascinated to learn about the interactions between mothers and babies, and how "baby language" actually stimulates the child's ability to pick up language later. I'm sure though, that I'll remember this much longer than Mithen's much more detailed arguments about how music and singing by mothers is part of this too. Similarly, he has very interesting stuff to say about how emotions develop and how collective living has always been central to human existence, but it all got lost in a wealth of detail and bittiness.

In the end, while thoroughly enjoying this book, I was also very disappointed by it - part of this contradiction lies in my thorough enjoyment of Mithen's earlier work, After the Ice. This was for me one of the best works about human development at the end of the last ice-age ever written for non-professionals interested in archaeology and human development. That was a superb book which will long remain with me. This is clearly a much more developed, complex work, which unfortunately didn't stimulate the right bit of my brain.

Related Reviews

Mithen - To the Islands
Mithen - After the Ice

Richard Morgan - Market Forces

A quick Google of the phrase "anti-capitalist science fiction" generates few hits. Perhaps this review will link Richard Morgan's novel "Market Forces" with this rather apt description, even if I do say so myself.

The world of Market Forces is perhaps best described as an extrapolation of our own. The multinational corporations that dominate the world's economies of today have become more power than the nation state. Independent of it even. Their ruthless struggle for profits, plays itself out down to every level. Executives duel in armour plated cars on almost empty motorways for position in the company. Serious promotion can only occur by returning to work "with blood on your wheels". Such methods of "natural selection" mean that senior partners are only those ruthless enough to stamp out competition by any means necessary.

These individual battles play out against a backdrop of poverty, violence and drug-abuse on London's derelict estates. There's no welfare state left, a job marks the ordinary person out for violence, except for a few who live in armed gated communities in terror of the rest of the population.

I was reminded while reading this of some of those films of the 1980s, company executives, drunk on power, prepared to stamp on all opposition to get the money - Morgan's dark satire and humour is an extension of this. An unlikely world perhaps, but not impossible.

We follow one of the executives through the beginnings of a rather complex business deal (a deal that will could mean the lives of thousands being sacrificed) as he $battles personally for control. The novel concentrates on Chris Faulkner (*), as the contradictions of his life open up. His wife hates his violent life, though for a woman with principle, she's strangely tied to her husband. Deep down inside he seems to have princples, though they make themselves known in strange ways (Kneecapping of Nazis for instance).

The plot drifts along, without seeming to go any place simple. There's a lot of gung-ho drinking and fighting, quite a bit of unneccessarily detailed sex scenes and a fair bit of simplistic politics which combines to make a surprisingly intense reading experience.

If you like your anti-heros and you'll like this novel, particularly if you believe in a bleak future for man-kind. Though you don't have to share the author's cynical view of the human spirit.

(*) There's a neat little joke in the novel, when a night-club owner repeatadly jokes about the main character's surname being similar to the famous american novelist. Of course, none of the company executives, supposedly cleverer than the rest of the stupid masses understand the reference.

Victor Serge - Revolution in Danger; Writings from Russia 1919-1921

Victor Serge was certainly one of most able writers of 20th Century marxism. His life spanned some of the most important and exciting moments of the last century's revolutionary history, in particular he was actively involved with the Russian Revolution.

Serge travelled to Russia an anarchist. He rapidly became a Bolshevik and his commitement to this form of radical organisation didn't waver throughout the rest of his life.

The book starts with a fantastic account of Serge's life and his basic politics by Ian Birchall, as well as an overview of the Russian Revolution and the role of Anarchist politics within it.

The essays are from his time in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Soviet power, in its genuine sense, rather than some Stalinist distortion, was met by imperialist invasion from (amongst others, Britain, America and Japan). In turn this was met by military opposition from the newly formed Red Army.

In passionate on the spot reporting, Serge describes life in a Petrograd that is perhaps facing its last moments. He describes the wild rumours, the right-wing attempts at sabotage, the distant gunfire. But of more interest, is perhaps his understanding that the fight to defend Petrograd from the counter-revolutionary armies is being fought by men and women who have just overthrown a savage dictatorship and are beginning to create a world "turned upsidedown". So amongst the revolutionary barricades, we hear about the poetry clubs, the song recitals and musical performances.

In one of the later chapters, on the eve of the final battle, he describes one of his acquaintances, whose rifle butt rests on a book in his pocket. Serge asks this "obstinate rebel" what he is reading.... "Poincare..... The Value of Science".

On the eve of a great battle to save the city that was the heart of the revolution, it is entirely appropriate that the men and women who might die the next morning are reading, learning, thinking and dreaming of a different world.

The final essay in this book, is Serge writing about the attitude that Anarchists should take the the revolution, and in particular, the centralised revolutionary terror that the Red's have had to introduce to defend the revolution from the brutal$ities of the Whites.

Serge describes how many of the Russian anarchists, instinctively sided with the Revolution and the Bolsheviks, automatically understanding that to defend the gains of the revolution required organisation and military centralisation. Serge takes this further arguing that the anarchists must be engaged with the revolution, if only to temper some of the instinctive Bolshevik centralisation that he believes is natural for members of that party. Whether or not you agree with that, you cannot fail to understand Serge's basic point. Revolutions are never the perfectly formed events that many sectarian, armchair revolutionaries hope they are. Instead, they are complex, difficult events that have to be defended from the violence of their class enemies. It is a lesson that is still important.

Frank M. Snowden, Jr - Before Color Prejudice; The Ancient View of Blacks

Those who argue that racism can be overcome, or ended are often confronted with the argument that racism or prejudice has always existed. Many, particularly from the Marxist tradition have argued however that racism is a more recent invention - that there have been societies in the past (and indeed today) were racism was unheard off.

For this reason, Frank Snowden's book is a fascinating read. He examines Ancient images and portrayals of the black people's of Africa in writings, sculpture and painting. His conclusions are stark, but simple. Racism, as a systematic system of prejudice and oppression or as a set of ideas that assigned stereotypes to a group of people based on their skin colour.

Of course there may have been prejudices, but Snowden finds surprisingly few examples. Indeed, rather the opposite, he argues that for one society, that of Ancient Egypt, skin colour was rarely mentioned when describing someone from the regions to the south of Egypt. The "Nubian" peoples, where instead venerated as excellent warriors, often used in Egypt's armies as mercenaries. Similarly in Roman and Greek writings, were skin colour was mentioned, it was almost always in a descriptive, rather than derogatory way.

Neither the Greeks, Romans or Egyptians had any systematic negative views of black people. Snowden describes contemporary descriptions of the Roman children expressing initial surprise and fear upon seeing a black person for the first time, but also compares this to modern research into childhood responses to someone of a different skin colour. Research that shows that such childlike response rarely leads to racist views in adult life.

If there is a flaw in the book, it's that it doesn't really shed much light on why racism is so prevalent in modern society. One argument that Snowden gives is that the ancient people's lived side by side with black people, thus there was no shock of discovery as white and black people met for the first time.

I think this is a weak explanation. There certainly were a few black and Asian people who travelled to the western lands in more recent times, and certainly (as Snowden acknowledges) the bible refers to black men and women so Christian countries would have not been living in ignorance of non-white peoples. This knowledge and fleeting encounters did not lead to racism in the way we know it.

I think that it is important to say that modern racism as had a concrete starting point. This is the invention of racial explanations, by the white establishment to explain the slave trade. The brutalities of slavery could only be justified through some sort of racial demonisation and this needed to be invented.

This perhaps is the missing chapter of Frank Snowden's book, though in itself the book is a clear (and beautifully illustrated) explanation of the lack of racism in the ancient past. It's worth quoting the author's conclusions at length, as his work, I believe has had to small a readership:

...in the ancient world there were prolonged black-white contacts, from an early date; first encounters with blacks frequently involved soldiers or mercenaries, not slaves or so-called savages; initial favourable impressions of black were explained and amplified, generation after generation, by poets, historian and philosophers; the central societies developed a positive image in of peripheral Nubia as an independent stae of considerable military, political and cultural importance; both blacks and whites were slaves, but blacks and slaves were never synonymous; black emigres were noT excluded from opportunities available to others of alien extraction, nor were they handicapped in fundamental social relations - they were physically and culturally assimilated; in science, philosophy and religion color was not the basis of a widely accepted theory concerning the inferiority of blacks.

Carbon Trade Watch - The Carbon Neutral Myth, Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins

Just as it seems every politician, pop star, minor celebrity and even minor royal has started "offsetting" their round the world flights, climate campaigners at the Carbon Trade Watch (CTW) have brought out this brilliant short pamphlet to explain why Carbon Offsetting is actually making things worse.

On paper the idea is as simple as it is brilliant. You pay a company to "offset" the emissions you have made driving your SUV or flying across the Atlantic. This company takes your money and invests it in some project that absorbs Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere or reduces emissions of Greenhouse gases. Often this means planting forests in the third world, though one project mentioned by CTW involved giving poor people in South Africa low energy light bulbs (the fact that this would have happened anyway, without the input of the Offset company doesn't stop them using it as a marketing ploy).

There are numerous problems with this approach. The first is the hard science - CTW explain how Offset Companies use a form of "Future Accounting". Similar to Enron's business practises they basically claim future emissions reductions against gas output today. The best example of this is the investment by a Offset company in a new forest. It takes trees a long time to absorb Carbon Dioxide. Say 100 years. But, if you have emitted CO2 into the atmosphere today and it won't actually be removed from the atmosphere for a century, you've made the problem worse. To balance the equation faster, you need more trees, which costs more, making it unlikely many people will do it.

There are other problems. What if the forest dies from lack of water as the world heats up? Or what if the local population, displaced by the government who wants the new trees planted because they benefit from further Carbon Credits under the Kyoto Agreement, burns the forest?

This exact situation certainly did happen as evicted peoples around Mount Elgon in Uganda resisted attempts by their government and Carbon Offset companies to make them pay, so that Westerners could continue to emit greenhouse gases.

Of course, all this is big business too. CTW document the massive profits made by Offset companies and show how it's good business sense for some of the worst polluting corporations in the world to link themselves to the offset market. It makes them look green, rather than force them to change business practices.

And this is the heart of the problem. Offsetting your emissions does nothing to encourage a change of behaviour. It allows politicians and corporations to put the responsibility for stopping climate change back on the individual, while they get off scot-free. Indeed it does more than that. As CTW point out, it turns the honest desires of millions of people to do something to save the planet, into "another market transaction". What could be more dis-empowering?

Luckily as CTW point out, there are things that can be done, most of them much more empowering than giving your cash to some Internet based pseudo green company.

There is much more in this little book (including an amusing chapter on the role of celebrities in promoting Carbon Offsetting and a good analysis of the failure of Live8 to bring change). But above all, it is a fantastic antidote to those who believe the market will solve the climate crisis we face.

You can download this book from Carbon Trade Watch's website as a PDF here, though I bought a copy from Bookmarks for £5.

Heather Rogers - Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage

On average, each American produces 4.2 pounds of rubbish a day. Most of this is packaging. This staggering statistic starts Heather Rogers' fantastic book on garbage - a book that has lots of numbers, but never seems to let the reader drown in facts and figures. The figures are important, because the scale of the garbage problem is incredible. Rogers tells the historic story of rubbish, but she inevitably concentrates on the last 100 or so years. Before then, people were either so poor that their few belongings were used over and over, or (and this is the most important fact) their belongings were designed to be used, over and over again.

Heather introduces us to the odd roles that developed in a time of low garbage levels - the men and women who collected human waste to sell to farmers, the people who swept roads clear of horse manure to facilitate a easy crossing.

However the central theme of Rogers' book, is the way that modern day capitalism created the garbage problem, and how it has used and abused the solutions.

In its desperate drive to sell commodities to make profits, capitalism found that objects that lasted, didn't make the corporations money. So, they invented disposability, selling it to the consumer as convenience. We get the disposable bottles, razors and nappies. Then, the capitalists take the next logical step, they build in obsolescence or failure. Either the particular model goes out of favour, or it stops working a few years later and needs to be replaced.

Finally, the author examines at great length the great recycling swindle. Recycling is of course a good thing, it's often the first step that most people take down the road towards environmental awareness or action. However, it is very much a diversion. Rogers' points out how simply putting "please recycle this product when finished" on the outside of a drinks can, gives the corporation a sheen of green colouring, even though they are producing millions of "use once" tins.

The recycling industry gives people the impression that everything is OK. That "something is being down" and stops people questioning why so much stuff is produced in the first place. Why don't we have re-usable bottles? Why do we need disposable razors?

In a fascinating chapter, Rogers examines how the packaging companies in 50s America were well aware of this. "Keep America Beautiful" is the most famous, and first anti-litter campaigns. It wasn't started by environmentalists, but by the packaging companies who wanted to shift the blame for "waste" onto the individual consumer and avoid the finger being pointed at corporations that were in the process of pushing extra packaging on to the market.

Competing companies soon found that extra-packaging, disposable containers, or every changing marketing materials gave them an edge over competitors who remained with the same old, returnable, reusable bottle or container.

The last century has seen the rise of a consumer society, fueled by manufacturers desperate for us to purchase and purchase again their products. In doing so, they have contributed to a gigantic problem of waste. Where do we put this garbage? What does it do to the environment if we burn it, or dump it?

At a time when millions of people are looking at the sustainable nature of the society we live in and asking how we can avoid ecological disaster, Heather Rogers has produced more ammunition against the very nature of the system. Capitalism is, she argues, inherently wasteful - if we are to save the planet, we have to fundamentally change how society uses, produces and treats the material goods that currently form such an important part of our lives. In doing so, we may well create a society that feels it doesn't need so many of these objects in the first place, opting instead for lives that use less and share more.

John Newsinger – The Blood Never Dried – A People’s History of the British Empire

One of the unexpected consequences of the “War on Terror” has been an attempt to reinvent the history of the British Empire. To justify the actions of the American government around the world, it’s important to show the benevolence of previous Empires.

John Newsinger’s book has been written in response to this re-writing of history. In turn, Newsinger writes short and sharp pieces on moments and places of the British Empire. So we read how the British government decided that the free market would solve the Irish Potato famine of 1846 – resulting in a million deaths. We discover how the British murdered their way around countries from Egypt to China. How, in the interests of Free Trade they fought two brutal wars (though war is hardly the right term for such unequal conflicts) for the right to sell Opium to the Chinese, and along with this, raped, pillaged and plundered the country.

The “Jewel in the Crown” of the Empire, India, makes for several interesting chapters. Newsinger documents how the manner of British rule led directly to the uprising of 1857. Newsinger calls the events of 1857 an uprising (his authority is no-less a figure as Benjamin Disraeli who described the war as a “National revolt”) rather than the mutiny that it is normally described as.

Newsinger argues that the brutal nature of the uprising, described with glee in the media of the time, was only brutal because it was a response to the violence of British Rule up to that point. He quotes Karl Marx, writing at the time, that however violent the action of the rebels:

it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule.

The violence of the British troops in putting down the revolt, was often glorified as bravery, worthy of many medals. This violence of course was characteristic of all of Britain’s colonial rules. From the utter brutality of the British response to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, to the violence vested on those in countries like Malaysia, Egypt, Iraq or China who dared to question rule from London.

Newsinger’s book finishes with a reflection on the new aspect of imperialism. How Britain has become so linked to the new American Empire. The author argues that this is not something new, and it is actually a characteristic of Labour government policy over the years. Newsinger's conclusion is hopeful; he argues that historically while Empires are brutal, they are also weak. The hope he says must be that those resisting new attempts at neo-colonialism, can eject the oppressors from their lands.

You can read the full article by Karl Marx on the Indian Revolt, September 16th 1857 here.

The second edition of John Newsinger's book is now available from Bookmarks here.

Related Reviews

Newsinger - Fighting Back: The American Working Class in the 1930s
Newsinger - The Dredd Phenomenon: Comics and Contemporary Society
Newsinger - Chosen By God: Donald Trump, the Christian Right and American Capitalism
Newsinger - Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939

John Ray - The Rosetta Stone and the rebirth of Ancient Egypt

There is no doubt that the Rosetta Stone has captured the imagination of many thousands of people. It’s intriguing combination of scripts, unreadable except to the expert seem to conceal all the excitement of ancient Egypt. John Ray makes the point at the start of this little history of the Stone, that it is probably the British Museum’s most popular object. Certainly sales of Rosetta Stone postcards, mouse mats and t-shirts must bring in tremendous funds for the museum.

This is one of the excellent series of books on the “Wonders of the World”. However, I am not sure that it works in this context, as well as some of the others – however important the Rosetta Stone is to archaeology, it is not the Roman Colosseum or The Parthenon.

That said, the story of the stone (and the “rebirth of Ancient Egypt” that took place as a result of its study) is fascinating. While the inscription on the stone isn’t as exciting as perhaps we’d hope, the combination of three written languages allowed the unlocking of the language of the Ancient Egyptians. This in turn allowed scholars to read the words of the Egyptians for the first time since antiquity and in turn, re-opened their world to study.

John Ray does a superb job of bring the story of the translation into the open. Two main characters dominate, the Englishman Thomas Young, described accurately as a “polymath”, who started the process of unlocking the mysteries of Hieroglyphics and the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion, who perhaps single handed created the arena of history now known as Egyptology.

John Ray takes us through how they worked out the meaning of the words – first translating the ancient Greek, then gradually associating the different Hieroglyphics with the intermediary demotic script. We also read a potted history of other attempts to translate ancient writings and get a short breakdown of the step-by-step processes that are used. We also get a fleeting history of Egypt. The Egypt of the Pharaohs (and the sort of things they wrote about, including an amusing account of Egyptian erotica) and the Egypt that was fought over by French and British colonialism. A conflict that eventually lead to the Rosetta Stone spending the last two centuries in the British Museum.

John Ray also briefly examines the thorny question of who should own the Stone, or similar artefacts. Should they be returned to their country of origin? Can anyone really “own” such items? John ducks the issue slightly I feel .Certainly I think that Egypt has a greater claim on the Rosetta Stone than some of the more complex examples he raises. The Stone was imperial plunder from the region, and certainly Egypt’s museums are more than capable of looking after it and similar items.

But this is really a digression from what is an entertaining, informative and well-written account of one of the most important archaeological pieces in museums anywhere. Uniquely, its importance, as John Ray points out, isn’t simply about the information contained within its inscriptions, but it’s also about the history that has developed around the Stone and what it enabled historians to understand about the past.

Related Reviews

Keith Hopkins & Mary Beard - The Colosseum

Mike Gonzalez - Rebel's Guide To Marx

Mike Gonzalez's contribution to the excellent "Rebel's Guide" series must have been the hardest to even consider. How do you compress the life, times and political thought of one of the world's most important and influential philosophers into a book of less than 50 pages?

I have to say that Gonzalez does well. There are many more indepth and longer biographies of Marx - and the author hasn't tried to out do them, rather he's tried to draw out the key strands of Marx's thought and put them beside a description of how Marx develops politically. Starting from Marx's early student days, Gonzalez looks at how the radicals of the time where starting to view society and life as being based on material realities, he then charts Marx's development along the route of historical materialism.

Gonzalez never pretends Marx was simply a philosopher. Quoting Marx's famous comment "The philosophers have merely interpreted the world... the point is to change it", Gonzalez shows us a Marx immersed in the radical activities of the time, helping to instigate the First International and attending meetings of the International Working Men's association. Much of Marx's writings come of out these activities - The Communist Manifesto being the best example. But Gonzalez also shows us how Marx's examination of the Paris Commune helps him develop his theories of the state and political organisation.

Ultimately there is much that must be left out. But this is as close to the best short introduction to Karl Marx and his ideas that you can get and Gonzalez gives plenty of other suggestions for further reading.

Releated Reviews

Choonara - A Rebel's Guide to Trotsky
Bambery - A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci
Birchall - A Rebel's Guide to Lenin

Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens

This hilarious novel combines a clever spoof of the horror genre (in particular the Omen films) with razor sharp wit centred on the real-life horrors of the 16th Century Witch Trails.

Given the two authors probably haven't written an unfunny word in decades, you'll enjoy this if you need to escape the taxation of reading long books about philosophy, history, or, indeed if you have the 'flu.

I'm actually considering doing one of those lists - Top 100 books to read while sick in bed. This would be in there somewhere.

Of course, this classic (!) tale of good versus evil can't have a simple ending - neither good, nor evil actually wins. But that doesn't matter.

Can anyone tell yet that even though I only finished it yesterday, I am so unwell I've forgotten most of the plot? I also really liked the character of "Dog" - Hell's Hound, who for reasons that I can't go into, is a Yorkshire Terrier. Or some such small dog. Oh I'm giving up and going back to bed, read the Wikipedia entry on it, it's more comprehensive.

Harry Mount - Amo, Amas, Amat... and all that; How to Become A Latin Lover

Harry Mount might well be amused, given his impassioned plea that the end of this book for more people to learn and be taught Latin, that my partner, upon seeing his work on my bedside cabinet assumed that it wasn't about learning a new language at all.

That aside, this is an interesting book about what is commonly joked as being the "dead language". It's a basic introduction to the vocabulary and grammar of, as the author makes clear, the language used to write some of "the most heartbreaking poetry ever written". His style is amusing and accessible - he starts of by translating the tattoo on Angelina Jolie's belly "Quod me nutri me destruit" - "What nourishes me destroys me". Even if you don't know who Angelina Jolie(*) is, you can find amusement in the fact that this inscription was one her heavily pregnant belly.

Unfortunately, at least for me, Harry Mount failed completely to achieve his stated goal. I read this book as an entertaining read - enjoying the explanations of the origins of common words, or famous Latin phrases that we see on a regular basis - but I came away from reading it, not knowing Latin at all, and certainly not inspired to learn or study it further. Perhaps this is my old hatred of foreign languages coming to the fore. Though I would have thought I would have been within Mr. Mount's target group - I do enjoy reading Roman authors in translation, and perhaps I would benefit from reading heartbreaking poetry.

There is interesting stuff here - I now know why there isn't a year zero between 1BC and 1AD for instance, but very little of it is actually about speaking the language.

Finally, Mount's impassioned plea in his final chapter for more Latin teachers, harder Latin examines and more taught Latin doesn't ring true. I take his point, after-all, Latin is something that is required for many other subjects, but I'd rather see an education system that looks forward to new ways of learning and improving education wholesale, rather than harking back to the days of prep-school Latin and enforced translations of Catullus.

(*) A film actress apparently.

Primo Levi - If Not Now, When?

This is a work full of unimaginable pain and suffering. It follows a loose group of Jewish partisans behind German lines in the last few years of World War Two as they attempt to both survive and exact some military suffering on the German occupiers. Then as the war finishes, it follows their slow and difficult journey towards Italy and the hope of a ship to Palestine, where they dream of building a Jewish haven - Israel.

This isn't simply a work about the pain of war, nor the cold of the Soviet winter, though both of these are backdrops to an intense, difficult story. This is the story of people who have seen and survived horrors which we can't comprehend. The young Jew who watched the SS (boys scarcely older than himself) murder his family, the older Russian soldier who escaped a POW camp, and the man who watched all the Jews from his village forced to dig their own mass grave, before the Einsatzgruppen shot them all.

But these are people who don't give up. In contrast to those who would portray the victims of the Holocaust as men and women who meekly went to their deaths, Primo Levi celebrates those who never gave in. Those who fought back, those who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and those who believed that Nazism could be stopped.

But we are also confronted with other difficult facts. The liberating Russian army was as likely to lock up Jews, the defeated German villagers would still take pot-shots at Jews and for all the Zionist talk of Israel, the British made it hard for those who had escaped persecution to try and find refugee in Palestine.

Because this novel's characters are living, breathing individuals, who debate history, politics and religion, who question everything around them, it is much more than a simple tale of war. And because this was the most brutal of wars, the characters are never simple. They love, hate and seek revenge. But they also have hope. It's this hope that keeps them fighting and the novel is brilliant enough to fuel our hope that we can stop fascism, racism and anti-Semitism wherever they raise their head.

Thomas Mann - Death in Venice and Other Stories

From the evidence of this collection of stories, Thomas Mann was not a happy chap. Or at the very least, he enjoyed discussing the inner conflicts of man, and those emotions that could tear the best of people apart.

Saying that though, Thomas Mann clearly is one of the 20th Century’s greatest writers – his text reads almost poetically, though the subject is often heartrendingly painful.

Here for instance, are the opening sentences from his 1897 short story Der Bajazzo (The Joker)

“The end of it all, the upshot of life – of my life – is the disgust with which it fills me. A worthy ending indeed! Disgust with it all, disgust with the whole thing, this disgust that chokes me, goads me to frenzy and casts me down again into despair – sooner or later, no doubt , it will give me the necessary impetus to cut short the whole ridiculous, contemptible business and clear out for good.”

Such an passionate suicide note at the start of a story, indicates that it might not have the happiest of ending. But the genius perhaps of Mann, is to use such emotions to illuminate the human condition.

The titular story, Der Tod in Venedig, (Death in Venice) written in 1912, far surpasses the other tales in this collection. The story of the aged writer, reflecting back on his life in the glorious city of Venice, while falling in love with a beautiful teenager holidaying there was itself turned by Visconti into one of the greatest films ever made. This isn’t surprising – the theme which mixes the beauty of the city, with it’s rotting core, and the impossible love for a young man with the growing pestilence around them – mixes up just about every emotion that can be thought of in a single tale.

Few can read a work like this without wondering at the inner turmoil of the writer, but whatever the authors own emotions; these are works that make the reader reflect on the very feelings that make us human.

John Bellamy Foster – Ecology Against Capitalism

This collection of essays on a general theme of capitalism and the environment was first printed in 2002, though all the essays are from the previous decade. They predate, but predict many of the arguments that are emerging on the left (and within the wider environmental movement) as issues such as Global Warming become a serious mainstream political issue.

However the essays differ from many of the works coming out at the moment about the environment. In particular, they centre on what I believe should become a major debate within the environmental movement – whether capitalism can solve the environmental crisis we face.

Bellamy Foster is excellent on this question, which is approached from a number of different angles in the different essays. He examines for instance, how economists attempt to make the environment part of the market, so as to make a profit from it. He quotes Marx:

“For the first time nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognised as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subject it under human needs whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production”

All the essays are fantastically written, clear, concise and informative. Several in particular deserve particular mention “Global Ecology and the Common Good” is a brilliant counter argument to the idea that “we are all in it together”. “Capitalism’s Environmental Crisis – IS Technology the Answer” looks at whether simple technological improvements or innovations can provide solutions. He examines the so-called “Jevons Paradox” which argues that the consequences of technological innovation in improving fossil fuel efficiency has led to more fuel being burnt (as it becomes cheaper and more profitable to use it), rather than reduction in it’s use.

Finally, the essay which Bellamy Foster wrote to mark the 200th anniversary of Malthus’s Essays on Population is an excellent rejoinder to those who, still today, argue that the environmental crisis we face is a consequence of over-population, rather than an economic system that destroys everything in it’s path in the drive for profit.

Bellamy Foster is absolutely convincing on this. There cannot be a good capitalism, nor can there be good capitalists. The exploitation of the earth’s natural resources, in an inefficient, unsustainable way is part and parcel of the mechanisms at the heart of society. The ultimate “saving of the planet” will only be won, through the destruction of that system and it’s replacement with one based on need, not greed.

Mark Lynas - Six Degrees

The February 2007 part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report made a number of stark predictions about climate change. In particular, it examined the science behind global warming and made a number of consensus predictions about the effects.

Mark Lynas's book looks at the consequences in great detail. The basic science is very simple, the world gets hotter and various changes start happening - ice starts to melt, deserts spread and so on. As the world gets hotter these changes increase, but more worryingly, a number of "feedback effects" kick in. In other words, the consequences of even quite small amounts of global warming are to make further climate change more likely.

Lynas looks at 6 scenarios, though really they aren't separate. He examines how the world will look as temperature increases by one, then two degrees, all the way up to six. A planet that is six degrees hotter will be one that is uninhabitable by the standards we set today. Lynas backs his arguments up by looking not just at computer models, though there are plenty of those, but also at historic times when the world was warmer by up to 6 degrees.

Lynas paints a frightening future, but as with many other writers he argues it isn't inevitable, we just need to change major aspects of our lives. In this section, the book is not as detailed or as clear as other works (in particular George Monbiot's Heat). However, to be fair to Lynas, this isn't the major point of his work either.

My one criticism, is that sometimes the book reads like the six degree world is entirely seperate from the one and two degree one. To get to sixth degree of temperature rise, the world will have to travel through a time when the horrors of the other times are inflicted.

This is important, because as the world gradually heats, the effects will be immediate and this will have horrific consequences for many people. It will also, however make it even more clear to millions of people that the environment is changing. Hopefully by then, it will not be to late to do something about it. in the meantime, this is a very readable book that will hopefully alert thousands to the dangers and get them to start campaigning now.

(*) Full title - Six Degrees, Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Related Reviews

Flannery - The Weather Makers
Monbiot - Heat
Pearce - The Last Generation

Mike Davis – Planet of Slums

I suspect that most of the people who read this book (or indeed this review), will never have seen a slum. I don’t mean the run down bits housing estates that blight the cities of northern England; I mean a slum on a truly different scale. Mike Davis describes in terrifying detail just what sort of world it is, that huge numbers of people live in.

He starts of with the growth of the city, quoting UN reports he says

“In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population of more than one million; today there are 400, and by 2015 there will be at least 550”

This explosion of growth for cities doesn’t bring with it prosperity or jobs. While the “world’s urban labo[u]r force has more than doubled since 1980, and the present urban population – 3.2 billion – is larger than the total population of the world when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated”, huge numbers of these people have no meaningful income from work. According to a CIA report in 2002, by the late 1990s, a third of the world’s labour force, a “staggering” one billion people, had no work, or were underemployed.

The figures for the growth of slums are similarly shocking. People flocking to the cities in the search of employment, or because they have been pushed off the land, form giant illegal or semi-legal areas of housing. 60% of Mexico’s growth is due to people building their own homes on “un-serviced peripheral land”, similarly in the Amazon, “80 percent of growth has been in shantytowns”.

The word un-serviced is important here. These are huge areas of human population with little or no running water, sewerage systems or electricity.

Davis documents two facts that flow from this – how governments and the state ignore or give lip service to the people living in such poverty, and how often the role of NGOs is limited to trying to make the slums slightly better, rather than look at the root cause of the problem.

But Davis’ real fire is reserved for international financial policies that have helped create the slums in the first place and limited the ability of the state and government to provide services to help the poorest of the poor. The neo-liberal policies of the World Bank and the IMF have, since the 1970s, caused unemployment through the destruction of industry and public services and have meant that services that are offered to the poor (such as water provision) are often privatised. It’s an irony, that privatised water companies end up charging the poor huge amounts of money for what should be a basic human right.

“The situation in Luanda is even worse: there the poorest households are forced to spend 15 percent of their income on water that private companies simply pump from the nearby, sewage-polluted Bengo River.”

What's true for drinking water is also true for sewage:

In “India – where an estimated 700 million people are forced to defecate in the open – only 17 of 3700 cities and large towns have any kind of primary sewage treatment before final disposal”.

Mike Davis paints a picture of billions of people living in squalor, poverty and unemployment, unable to find work and ignored by governments more interested in making a few people richer. However he finishes on an interesting point. Military thinkers around the world already plan how they might intervene in such slums. Fearful of insurrection and “anarchy” they worry about how the chaotic unplanned slums could be controlled – But “If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side”, Davis concludes.

Related Reviews

Davis - The Monster at our Door

Arthur Ransome - We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea

All the children's novels Arthur Ransome wrote are escapism. This one deals with the unlikely story of four children alone on a sailing boat that is swept out to sea during a night of fog and storm, and how they navigated it safely to Holland. Perfect reading material for the bored child.

Like many of his books, this is full of nautical detail - but not enough to drown the reader who doesn't sail. In fact much of the detail is of great interest to anyone, but Ransome's great gift was to describe adventure from a child's point of view - these kids aren't above crying for their mum when things get tough.

If you know the other novels, you'll remember Susan. The eldest girl, rather motherly in outlook - always responsible for cooking, cleaning and looking after the other children. As the ship is pummelled by the waves and she finds herself with uncontrollable seasickness, she cries bitter tears of panic. No one reading this will fail to identify with her - even if you don't know your sailors knots.

One final point of historical interest. These novels, written in the 1930s, are from an era when foreign travel was rare, even for the well off. So the children's arrival in Flushing in Holland, is cause for Ransome to spend time in detail describing the sights, sounds and smells of a foreign port, with all the excitement that would mean for his readers 70 odd years ago. Today in an era when children have crossed the channel by 'plane and ferry, crossing it in a small sail boat might seem at first unexciting. Ransome's skill is to bring more innocent era back to life, and make us wish we were kids then too.

Duncan Hallas - Trotsky's Marxism

This little book by Duncan Hallas, one of the longest standing members of the SWP in Britain until his death in 2002, contains a brilliant summary of the work of the great revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In particular, it takes a critical look at four key strands of his ideas.

In my previous review of a book about the Russian Revolution, I said that one of the argument levelled against that revolution was that it was a coup, as opposed to a workers' uprising. Another argument against it, common amongst some political parties at the time, was that Russia was too backward to have a successful working class revolution.

So, in the first section of this book, Hallas looks at Trotsky's groundbreaking theory of "permanent revolution" - this was Trotsky's belief that a backward country did not have to follow the path of development towards industrial capitalism BEFORE reaching the stage where a socialist revolution could be carried through. He argued that rather than the emerging capitalist class of Russia playing a progressive historical role as they had down in Britain, they would be unable to carry this through for fear of the powerful, emerging working class.

Hallas summarises this beautifully - and even though this book was written in 1979, the argument remain of course important for areas of the world undergoing radical change today (in particular one thinks, South America).

Hallas looks at other strands of Trotsky's thought. He rescues the idea of the United Front (the idea that revolutionary organisations must often work together with reformists) from the distortions that it underwent by those who followed Stalin.

The final part of the book looks at how Trotsky, and his small band of followers survived when the traditions of genuine socialist thought were being smashed by Stalinism. He looks at how Trotsky viewed Soviet society, even though it was clearly no longer socialist in a way that any genuine follower of Marx could believe.

This bit of the book is probably the most interesting for those, like me, whose political activity came after the 1980s and 1990s when small grouplets' discussions were dominated by theories on the nature of Russian society. It's a useful introduction to ideas of "Degenerated Workers States" and a brief introduction to the theory of State Capitalism.

Hallas' belief that Trotsky was one of the greatest revolutionaries, who carried the flame of socialism so a new generation of activists could carry on the struggle, bursts through in every section of this book. But his belief that revolutionary leaders are never perfect marxists who never make a mistake, particularly when they become isolated from the great movements that have made them, means that Hallas is never afraid to criticise Trotsky, in order that the new generation is better armed for future battles.

Trotsky's Marxism by Duncan Hallas, can be downloaded from the Marxists Internet Archive here or find out if Bookmarks has a second hand copy.

Since writing the above review, I've been told that Trotsky's Marxism is available in Arabic as a PDF here.

Related Reviews

Choonara - A Rebel's Guide to Trotsky

S.A.Smith – Red Petrograd; Revolution in the Factories 1917-1918

For those who want to attack the Russian Revolution of October 1917, there are many myths to peddle. Chief amongst these, are that the revolution wasn’t anything of the sort, rather the argument goes, it was a coup, organised by the minority Bolshevik party with little popular support.

There are many ways to demolish this myth, one of them, is to actually look at what ordinary workers in the stronghold of the revolution – Petrograd – thought and did. In particular, the struggles they fought and the people they supported in the heady days of 1917.

Anyone with an interest in the Russian Revolution, and by extension, an interest in defending it against it’s right-wing critics, will be fascinated by Smith’s book. It’s an in-depth look at the Petrograd working class, particularly those in the major factories.

Smith comes to many conclusions. The most important of these, is that he paints a picture of a revolutionary city, that throughout 1917, starting with the overthrow of the Tsar in February, is thinking, acting and fighting for itself. The slogans of popular power and worker’s control aren’t imposed from outside, rather they are slogans that are raised by the workers themselves in response to the day-to-day experience of revolution.

As 1917 progressed, many forces came into play. The immediate gains of the February revolution gave confidence to the mass of workers. Their organisations, in particular Factory Committees started to fundamental alter the balance of society. In the factories, men and women began evicting management and changing every aspect of working life. Ending “piece work”, removing rude or particularly oppressive overseerers and, most importantly, starting to organise production themselves.

It would be impossible to go into the detail in this review. Smith’s book is an extensive look at what happened in those months. Its conclusions are backed up by huge amounts of facts and figures (from strike statistics to information about literacy) and often the arguments are supported by the voices of the Petrograd workers themselves.

While the Bolsheviks are by no means the most important or the largest socialist party at the beginning of 1917, Smith shows how their consistant argument, their principled opposition to the war and their support for working class control of production gradually win them more and more support.

Their members aren’t isolated from the workers. They are the workers. It’s only by seeing this, that we are able to understand just how the revolution became possible. The final thing that Smith does is to show that the very backward nature of the Russian economy left the revolution dependent on international revolution. The war and economic crisis (followed by the western invasion in 1919) left the country drained. With the failure of the German revolution, and the isolation of Russian Soviet power, the rise of a bureaucracy and the eventual development of a new “capitalistic” society became almost inevitable. However this is beyond the scope of Smith’s book. What this book does do, is to nail the lie that the October revolution was something imposed from above and we see the revolution for what it really was – a mass action by ordinary people fed up of war and poverty, who believed they could create a better world.