Steve Burrow - The Tomb Builders in Wales 4000-3000 BC

The Tomb Builders is a companion book to Shadowland. Both deal with very distinct, but linked periods of ancient history. They concentrate on the region we now know as Wales, though as I remarked when reviewing Shadowland it is a problem of modern nationalism that we are trying to understand an areas region through a nation unknown during the period covered.

In fact, Burrows makes it clear that any delineation between those living and tomb building in what is now known as Wales and elsewhere in what is now known as Europe is impossible. Influences on tomb styles in Wales come from Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall (and wider England) and northern France. Burrows looks at these different styles and traces the links they represent with a much wider human landscape. He examines for instance, the way that these ancient people must have traded or exchanged tools from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Given that some of these tombs date from five or six millennia ago we know very little about their use. Excavation has taught us much. So we can speculate with reasonable accuracy on how the dead were interred (usually after the bodies had lost most, or all of their flesh) and how some tombs were repeatedly reused. We also know that some tombs were not re-opened, and others were revisited hundreds of years after they had been sealed, for further burials, or internment of ashes.

As with the stone circles discussed in Shadowland, Burrow shows that often the wider landscape had a important role in the choice of position for tombs. The burrows and cairns surrounding them were positioned often so that they commanded a prominent position along mountain routes and valleys.

The era of the tomb builders ended fairly abruptly as communities grew in size and larger scale monuments became more common. Burrows also links this with a rise in the use of single-occupancy burials, perhaps reflecting a change in culture. The tombs as we see them today are often very different from the covered mounds that were originally built and their antiquity often belays the fact that they may well have only been in use as tombs for a few centuries, as radiocarbon evidence from the bones found inside shows.

Nonetheless, the tombs themselves had an important role in the longer term culture of those who lived in the region. This was true of ancient times, but also true of much more recent communities. Burrows finishes this short book with a quick look at some of the more recent myths and legends associated with the burial places.

This is an excellent introduction to the ancient history of Wales, beautifully illustrated and the author is not afraid to argue his own point of view, even if it is not universally accepted (he argues for instance, that a passage tomb at Bryn Celli Ddu in Anglesey was deliberately lined up with the midsummer solstice. This is a view first put forward in the early 20th century and has been much debated since.) For anyone interested in the period, or visiting sites like Tinkinswood I'd recommend this read.

Related Reviews

Burrow - Shadowland
Pryor - Britain BC

Robert Roberts - The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century

Taking it's title from Frederick Engels' description of Salford, The Classic Slum is part social history, part autobiography and part oral-history book. I've reviewed Robert Roberts' account of his childhood, A Ragged Schooling here, and was surprised to find that The Classic Slum is not a dry historical account of Salford. While there are some similarities between the two books and they cover similar periods, Roberts has created a very readable account of slum life in Salford. His account covers everything from education to crime and punishment and often he illustrates his point with a personal anecdote. Making this a very readable work of history. The descriptions of school life, or post-war dance halls are fascinating and occasionally too brief.

At the centre of Roberts' account is the First World War. Roberts' argues that before the war, most of the slum dwellers were part of an undermass. Men and women who had unskilled work, if they had any work at all, whose lives were marked by poverty and the constant quest for money to buy food or pay the rent. He dismisses those who look back on the period as some sort of golden age, arguing instead that the grinding poverty held little rosiness for most of Salford's population. Their lives were rarely happy and many people coped simply through drink, or violence.

The First World War, Robert's suggests led to a dramatic change. This is, he argues, not simply in the way that employment patterns changed, or the fact that many men joined up, the war he says, "cracked the form of English lower-class life and began an erosion of its socio-economic layers that has continued to this day". While I don't think that English class was so much as eroded, certainly it was changed. After the war, Robert's shows how the expectations of those who'd had decent wage packets for the first time, or returned from that army, were dramatically changed. So to was the position of women in society. Characteristically, Robert's shows this with a bitter-sweet recollection.

"My father was typical. In his cups he was wont to boast that, at the lathe he had to manipulate a micrometer and work to limits of one thousandth of an inch. We were much impressed, until one evening, in 1917 a teenage sister running a capstan in the iron works remaked indifferently that she, too, used a 'mike' to even finer limits. There was, she said, 'nothing to it'. The old man fell silent. Thus did status crumble!"

Roberts points out that during the war so 642,000 women went into government factories and millions more men and women were "doing manual work of almost every kind and developing new skills and new self-confidence." These people were changed and so was the perception of work and society. "The awe that many simpler souls had felt before the mystery of craft began to evaporate, to be replaced by at least some rational understanding."

This helps to explain the political transformation that took place. Roberts shows that socialist activism and politics was always part of Salford life. In fact the description of a great dock strike and a big solidarity demonstration by women is one of the highlights of The Classic Slum. But most of the "undermass" that Roberts described remained he says, indifferent to socialist agitators and parties. After the war this changed. The impact of the Russian Revolution, as well as the changes to peoples lives and work meant new ideas were about. People gathered to listen to socialist speakers on the street-corner near Roberts' family shop, where before they had ignored them. When his area elected its first Labour MP, Roberts' mother cried and they felt part of a new world.

This is no sentimental, rose-tinted view of working-class past. This is a book seeped in the sad history of Salford, where tens of thousands suffered from poverty and unemployment. Occasionally, those men and women fought back, struggling for change. Most of the time, they were ignored by the establishment, except when church or schoolmaster lectured them on morality and behaviour. While I don't necessarily agree with every aspect of Roberts' analysis (I'd like to see more studies of the people who made up the "undermass" for instance, and to what extent they could break out of this poverty trap), because this account is rooted in Roberts' own recollections, it is a living history one in which real people lived, suffered and struggled, sometimes laughing, often crying. For these reasons it deserves to be read by everyone, even those who have never visited the city.

Related Reviews

Roberts - A Ragged Schooling
Mayhew - London Labour and the London Poor
Fishman - East End 1888
Wise - The Blackest Streets

Richard Morgan - The Steel Remains

Richard Morgan is best known for his gritty, violent, near-future novels, usually set in a universe where Earth's multinationals hold enormous power over people and governments. The Steel Remains was his first foray into fantasy writing and Morgan has brought to the genre his unique blend of violence, realism and sex.

There are no kindly elves or banqueting dwarves in this novel. Set in a feudal Empire The Steel Remains is centered on three heroes of an earlier war. Each of them suffers from the veterans disease - they're heroes, but once hostilities are over, no one, least of all the authorities seems to really care. Ringil Eskiath is living in self imposed exile in a small village were he earns his keep by telling travellers at the local inn, battle stories in exchange for food and lodging. His previous companions suffer their retirement similarly, herding animals or working for the emperor.

Morgan's earlier novels have been violent affairs and when the human empire in this one is threatened by supernatural invasion, his characters fight back with swords, daggers and spears. The cutting edge technology here, as opposed to the guns of Morgan's science fiction makes for more brutal reading. In addition to the blood and spilt guts, Morgan spends quite a bit of time dealing with the sexual activities of his characters. In particular, Ringil Eskiath, who is not only in exile, but also shunned by a deeply homophobic culture.

Morgan paints a picture of a society were macho behaviour, violence and brutality are as much a part of daily life as grinding poverty and farming. Those who celebrate Ringil's exploits in the war, also fear and despise his sexuality, which sets up some key scenes in the story. In this interview, the author remarks on his surprise and annoyance that some reviewers who clearly enjoyed his earlier books (laced as they were with violence and heterosexual sex) seem to find this one "gratuitous". All I can comment is that some of those reading and writing about fantasy need to wake up to 21st century realities and stop judging the world by the norms of Tolkien.

All in all The Steel Remains is an enjoyable, modern take on the swords and sorcery genre. It did not grab me as much as Morgan's more recent Black Man and due to it setting lacks some of his more nuanced commentaries on contemporary society. Readers looking for something slightly different from the sterile worlds of Tolkien and Brooks may well enjoy this.

Related Reviews

Morgan - Black Man
Morgan -  Woken Furies
Morgan - Market Forces 

J.S. Weiner - The Piltdown Forgery

In December 1912, Charles Dawson and Arthur Woodward announced an enormous scientific discovery to a packed lecture room. Hundreds of scientists were fascinated because the find could offer proof of Darwin's evolutionary theory and because in those days of scientific racism, some were hoping that a European proto-human might be found to counter the ancient remains that had hither-to only been found in Asia.

Piltdown Man has become synonymous with archaeological and anthropological forgery, yet the story of how the hoax was uncovered is a fascinating tale of scientific investigation. This contrasts with the way that some sections of the scientific community hailed the revelations at the time despite some serious doubts about the finds and the discoverer.

Almost as soon as the discovery was announced, it courted controversy. Some argued that the two pieces were not from the same skeleton, others muttered darker allegations. David Waterson, Professor of Anatomy for instance, "found it hard to conceive of a functional association between a jaw [bone] so similar to that of a chimpanzee and a cranium in all essentials human."

The problem was several-fold. Firstly at the beginnings of the twentieth century there were very few ways of determining an item's age. For particularly ancient finds, the best way of doing so was to date it from surrounding geography and geology, as well as other contemporary items that could be dated by other means. Today, a few hours of carbon dating would have exposed the Piltdown hoax very quickly. In 1912 things were much more complicated. Secondly since the scientists did not really know what an early human might look like the differences in the structure of the jaw-bone to that of a modern human were merely assumed to be because the bone came from an early evolutionary stage. Finally the hoaxer and gone to extreme lengths to make the find look genuine. The bones were stained in ways that were difficult to detect with contemporary instruments. The pieces were scattered and other, more unusual finds were associated with them. Finally, the principle discoverer, Charles Dawson was notoriously bad at recording his finds and keeping records.

J.S. Weiner was one of the scientists who gathered together all of the scientific proof that the Piltdown remains were a forgery and this is the classic history of the expose. Despite effectively being a documentation of a scientific investigation that is wholly negative, it contains a wealth of detail for the reader, and dare I say it, lessons for scientists from multiple disciplines today.

Most of the first half of the book is an account of the discovery and unveiling of the various finds associated with Piltdown, followed by a detailed marshaling of the evidence against an ancient age for the bones. Firstly Weiner argues that the gravels were the remains were "found" were completely "unfossiliferous" (a rather wonderful word there). Secondly he describes an ingenious dating method used before carbon-dating which dates a bone by the amount of fluorine it has absorbed since internment. This is one of the gems of science in this book and was a bit of a revelation to me. Weiner documents the expose of the various types of staining of the bones and other remains that was designed to make them appear old and finally he argues that "our scrutiny of the accounts of the digging up of the various fragment has given us no confidence that anything did come from undisturbed soil, despite Dawson's assertions."

The order of this is important. Weiner goes to great lengths to make the reader feel that he has proved the forgery scientifically. Once that has been accomplished, Weiner, in the second half of the book, sets out an argument that demolishes Charles Dawson's claims to a scientific authority.

When this book was first published in 1955 most of the principle people who had been involved had died. Nonetheless, Weiner remains careful not to point the finger to much. In fact, by starting with the science he avoids the book becoming simply a collection of allegations and gossip aimed at some of those involved. Having said that, Weiner does demonstrate that Charles Dawson in particular had a very bad reputation amongst his colleagues (amateur and professional) and a series of dubious discoveries to his name. These discoveries seem laughable today, and I cannot document them here. I would direct the interested reader to this short piece or Weiner's book.

It appears that several of Dawson's contemporaries (again, amateur and professional) never believed that the Piltdown was real. In fact one, Harry Morris, claimed to have overheard a conversation by Dawson that a fossil tooth, that was important to the identification of the bones as ancient, was "imported from France". Dawson was accused of "salting the mine", a damning allegation that matched other, contemporary criticisms of him for "plagiarism" and lack of scientific rigour.

Since Weiner and his colleagues proved the Piltdown hoax there has been much speculation about who was the perpetrator of the crime. Circumstantial evidence as well as some witness statements make it almost certain that Charles Dawson was the guilty party. Weiner points out that there may have been others involved, or a single other person who led a willing Dawson along. However Weiner also shows convincingly that this unknown other party must have been extremely knowledgeable in a variety of scientific disciplines as well as knowing Dawson's movements very well.

While there will always be a lingering doubt over Dawson's role, he died long before the truth came out. A more interesting question is why the doubts that did exist were never allowed to be part of the scientific discourse around the discovery. In some cases personal conflict was an important part. Harry Morris for instance seems to have had an ongoing feud with Dawson and while his own notes show clear belief in forgery from day one, he didn't declaim this publicly. Part of the problem was that the Piltdown theory backed up Morris' own wider theories of human history in southern England.

Weiner's book then shouldn't simply be seen as an attempt to expose a criminal, though it reads like an archaeological detective novel. Instead it is a wonderful explanation of the importance of the scientific method. The mistakes that were made by scientists in the early 1900s may have had their roots in racial beliefs, mistaken scientific knowledge, or simply a desire to be associated with a breakthrough discovery. Dawson himself exhibited what Weiner calls an "anxiety for recognition" - never a good thing for a scientist.

More importantly the final expose of the Piltdown forgery demonstrates how important it is for scientists to have a well rounded knowledge, rather than specialising too much. Bringing together archaeology, anthropology, chemistry, physics and history as well as being prepared to search through old cupboards and bookshelves, Weiner's and his colleagues exposed a sad episode in the history of science. But they may have made us all clearer on our own history in the process.

This review is of the 1955 edition of The Piltdown Forgery. The re-publication in 2003 had a new introduction and afterword by Chris Stringer which no-doubt puts the debates into a modern context. I would suggest that readers interested in reading Weiner's book try and find the edition with the Stringer pieces. This can be ordered as print-on-demand from the publisher here.

Related Reviews

Stringer - The Origin of Our Species

Judith Shapiro - China's Environmental Challenges

When groups of environmental campaigners gather together, it does not take long for China to come up in discussion. Frequently this is in a frightened or alarmist way, along the lines of the irreparable damage to the planetary systems that will occur if China continues to develop along the trajectory it is. Environmentalists frequently cite the number of coal powered stations being built, or the projected number of cars in China or most frequently the size of the population. China is also raised in the context of its own environmental problems - the scale of Chinese environmental problems, whether its the expansion of desert, deforestation or the problems caused by dam building.

In his book Heat, the radical environmental journalist George Monbiot pointed out that the first of these tendencies is often "another manifestation of our ancient hysteria about the Yellow Peril". It fails to take into account, he points out, the way that emissions "per person" in China are far less than the average citizen of the UK or America.

Judith Shapiro is certainly not in this camp at all. Her relationship with China and its people is a long one, that goes back to the 1970s when she was one of very few English teachers in the country. She writes about the country and its culture with a great fondness, and while she is certainly not uncritical of the country and its government, she certainly does not fall into the trap of seeing China as the world's greatest environmental threat.

That said, one of the themes that runs through Shapiro's book is the existing environmental crises that China faces. The World Bank has found that 20 or the world's 30 most polluted cities are in China, usually because of coal being burnt for industry. The majority of Chinese cities have levels of sulphur dioxide that far exceed healthy levels, 28% of Chinese rivers are so polluted they are unsuitable for agriculture (according to the Chinese government itself). The immense size of China's population means that these environmental problems impact enormous numbers of people; 300 million people in rural China lack access to safe drinking water.

Shapiro argues that while the large population of China is a problem, there is evidence that the population growth is stabilising, as fertility rates are low. Rather the problem lies with an economic system that is in direct competition with the rest of the world, and whose turn towards the "globalized free market capitalism" since Mao's time has led to worsening environmental problems. Shapiro in no way argues that Mao was the greater leader, whose guiding hand ensured economic prosperity while protecting nature and China's natural resources. She painfully documents the experiences of millions of Chinese people under Mao, who saw the state attempt to redraw the natural world in its own interests, often with appalling consequences for ordinary people. However she sees the "limits on public participation and freedom of information" as major obstacles
to societies ability to make "wise choices". Environmental problems are one consequence of this.

Unlike many authors (and indeed many environmentalists) Shapiro argues that the Chinese government has tried to take environmental questions very seriously. Since the 1980s in particular, China has signed up to a variety of international agreements on the reduction of pollution and Shapiro says, the central government "deserves tremendous credit for trying to integrate environmental concerns into its plans, laws and policies." In part this is likely to be a recognition that a population made sick from environmental problems, pollutions, leaks and disasters is going to be unable to work in Chinese factories and farms, but it is also, she says a "response to growing public clamour about the impacts of pollution on health and quality of life." I'll return shortly to this "clamour".

Shapiro gives credit to the central government and puts lots of blame for environmental problems on problems at lower levels of the Chinese system. She contrasts the "desire for sustainability" from central government with a "pollute first, mitigate later" attitude found in branches of the government and regional leaders. Later she points out that the states own ability to implement anti-pollution laws is limited by corruption and a culture of bribery in Chinese society.

This might seem to be an argument for a more centralised state. Indeed, Shapiro herself points out that hte government is now trying to continue this "strong centralized envvironmental policy" and improve its ability to implement these laws at a time when local and regional bodies have much economic and political autonomy. While reading China's Environmental Challenges I did feel on occasion that the author was a little too soft on central government. Her own arguments point out that the real problem is that there is an enormous emphasis on growth within the Chinese economy. At all levels of society it is economic growth that is rewarded and it is this that lies that the heart of the growing environmental crisis. China may well be doing "much more on climate change than it is required to do under international law" but this is not enough and the country's economic need to catch and compete with developed nations is unlikely to over-ride this voluntary behaviour at some point. Nonetheless Shapiro is right to point out that China is ahead of the game in terms of some environmental work, being far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of renewable energy. Though while China may have the largest wind farms, the enormous quantities of solar panels manufactured and exported is less to do with a benign attitude to the planet and more to do with securing profits.

A major part of this book looks at those movements that are challenging industrial and government behaviour over the environment. It has been, and still is, enormously difficult for political activists to organise in China. Environmental questions have often been ones where there has been a space to organise and Shapiro documents the history of some of the most important campaigns and activists. In terms of today, she points out that environmental "mass incidents" are estimated to number around 5000 per year. These are frequently protests against pollution or the building of plants that might cause future damage. Sadly not enough of the book is devoted to this fascinating aspect of China's current political situation. Shapiro concentrates on the development and role of NGOs around environmental questions which might reflect a slight over-emphasis by her on the newly enriched middle class. Shapiro argues that the more affluent and educated Chinese are more likely to be able to organise (she documents the use of mobile phone networks for instance) and frequently this is, she argues, on the basis of a NIMBY attitude rather than a concern for the wider environment. This may well be true, but I feel that without a corresponding analysis of the wider political response from workers and peasants to things like pollution or dam building it is hard to know whether the "mass incidents" are large groups of middle class activists or angry demonstrations and strikes by workers and peasants.

Shapiro concludes her book by pointing out that observers of China usually fall into two camps, "critics and apologists" and she has tried instead to offer a nuanced analysis that understands there are good and bad aspects to China today from the point of view of environmental questions. This is undoubtedly true, a knee-jerk anti-China attitude from the environmental movement will get us nowhere, and will indeed weaken our own movements ability to criticise our own governments. I do however think that Shapiro's final analysis is weak, she hopes that "we can support the actors within the central government who are trying to 'green' the country's administrative patterns by acknowledging and praising them in international forums... etc".

The problem with this argument is that it does nothing to challenge the fundamental problems with any economy based on the accumulation of wealth, either because of competition between blocks of national capital (companies, state run industries and the like) or because of competition between national economies. For China to develop into a sustainable economy, will mean that the people of that country, from the bottom up will need to challenge a system increasingly run for profit and create a new system run in the interests of people and planet. That is not to argue that the solution is a return to some mythical past of Chinese socialism, but rather to see that the mass movements developing across the country, offer the beginnings of a new way of organising society. Judith Shapiro has laid out well the enormous environmental challenges facing the people of China. There will no doubt be big struggles ahead as increasingly people and planet are sacrificed in the name of competition, but if there is to be a sustainable future, the Chinese people will have to be at the forefront of fighting for it.

Related Reviews

Monbiot - Heat
Rogers - Green Gone Wrong
Pearce - The Landgrabbers

My own pamphlet, "Marxism and Ecology: Capitalism, socialism and the future of the planet" has been translated into Chinese and is available to purchase online here.

Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm

Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm is one of those novels that has outgrown the object of its lampoon. Who today reads Mary Webb? Her purple prose is, I suspect, mostly known through the passages that Stella Gibbons highlights with a couple of asterisks to let the reader know that a moment of pure piss taking. Stella Gibbons is a wonderful writer, at her best when destroying another authors style:

"***The country for miles, under the blanket of the dark which brought no peace was in its annual tortured ferment of spring growth; worm jarred with worm and seed with seed... The trout-sperm in the muddle hollow under Nettle-Finch Weir were agitated..."

The novel centres on the visit of Flora Poste to Cold Comfort Farm. The Farm is an island of insanity in the wider countryside. It's inhabitants are all ill-adjusted individuals, whose lives are twisted and distorted by the bizarre matriarch Aunt Ada, who confines herself to her room except for an annual counting.

Flora rapidlly breaks down these individuals, finding each of them what they really want and undermining the Aunt Ada's power until Ada herself is sent to Paris on an aeroplane transformed by the hidden potential found in an old edition of Vogue.

Stella Gibbons has a unique comic style. In parts the humour is near slapstick (people fall down the well regularly, or enjoy talking to water-voles). Elsewhere the amusement is in the prose.

Here's Gibbons' description of Cold Comfort Farm's history:

"The farmhouse was a long, low building, two-storied in parts. Other parts of it were three-storied. Edward the Sixth had originally owned it in the form of a shed in which he housed his swineherd, but he had gown tired of it and had it rebuilt in Sussex clay. Then he pulled it down. Elizabeth had rebuilt it, with a good many chimneys in one way and another. The Charleses had let it alone.; but William and Mary had pulled it down again, and George the First had rebuilt it. George the Second however burned it down. George the Third added another wing. George the Fourth pulled it down again.... it was known locally as 'The Kings Whim'."

At times this is a very dark novel. Tell anyone that you're reading it, and if they know the book, they quote "something wicked in the woodshed". Yet there is a deeper darkness that lies in the unknown. Flora visits Cold Comfort from the bright lights of London. Rural England is full of strange practices and behaviour. Incest is hinted at, and Gibbon's use of strange languages and invented practises only adds to this strangeness, clettering and mollocking are never really explained, but certainly sound wrong, even if the former is just a way of cleaning dishes. Stella Gibbons' wonderful writing, her humour and her brilliant spoof of a particular type of novel, makes this a literary classic.

Fred Pearce - The Landgrabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns The Earth

Unnoticed to the vast majority of people in the world, there is an enormous "grab" of land taking place. Much of the reason for this land grab comes down to one word - profit. There are other reasons; fear of food insecurity or concerns for other natural resources. But by and large the individuals and the organisations that are grabbing land around the world, kicking off the current inhabitants and often dramatically alternating the ecology of the place, are doing so because they hope to make money from bio-fuels, food price rises or access to other resources.

Estimates of how much land is being grabbed vary dramatically, the World Bank has estimated that 47 million hectares have been bought up, stolen or taken through deals of varying legality. Oxfam though came up with an estimate of 227 million hectares a year or so after the World Bank. Whichever extreme is right, this is an enormous quantity of space that has affected millions of people.

Fred Pearce argues that most land grabbing is taking place to impose industrial scale farming on a region. Farming that can produce the sort of mono-crops that will make large amounts of money on the market when sold for food, or biofuel. Often this land is sold because it is described as being empty or under-used. But as Pearce points out, "in reality very little land in the world today is unclaimed or unused."

He points out, for instance, that one of the largest "prizes" for the landgrabbers, is an area of grasslands known as the Guinea Savannah Zone, half the size of the US. Pearce writes that "The World Bank calls these four million square kilometres 'the world's last large reserves of underused land'." But "underused" in this context is from the point of view of western, industralised farming. For the 600 million African peasants, farmers and herders (a tenth of the world's population) who live in this area, they certainly don't see the land as underused. In fact it provides their livelihoods and their food. They may well need development, but not development that will push them off their land to live on the margins of enormous cities, in poverty stricken slums and shanty towns.

Some of Pearce's book is an excellent critique of modern farming methods, that are geared towards profit not feeding people. He points out that the landgrabbing that is taken place does so based on a vision of economics that is tremendously destructive to the natural world and is enormously bad at feeding people, particularly the poorest. This vision of farming is dangerous however, because it assumes that the best way to produce crops is through coping the energy intensive, pesticide dependent methods used in North America, Europe and other parts of the developed world. Pearce points out that this often doesn't work. Sometimes because crops are inappropriate, sometimes because it doesn't fit with local communities and their ways of organising, but also because it makes enormous assumptions about local ecology.

Those who have studied historical colonialism will see many parallels of past practice by imperial powers and landgrabs today. Indeed Pearce uses a number of historical examples to demonstrate how attempts to impose western crops and methods on parts of Africa or Southern America rapidly failed. However the similarities are not simply todo with failures like this, or even the ruthless treatment of local indigenous peoples. There are often racist assumptions about local people and practises that justify to the landgrabber their behaviour. The vision of land as "under utilised" is one aspect of this.

In his marvellous book Changes in the Land William Cronon makes the point that English colonialists in New England considered Native Americans "lazy" because they under-utilised their own land. Compare this with this quote that Fred Pearce uses from a Chinese manager who runs farmland in Africa:

"The biggest problem with agriculture in Senegal is people's mentality. They are very easily satisfied. If they have enough to eat, they won't work any more. There is a lot of arable land that they don't use."

Some of these landgrabs are enormous. They become self-sufficient areas, outside of normal law and order. Pearce documents the dubious and violent methods that land is taken away from people who have farmed or herded on it for decades. Broken promises, attacks, violence or threats are often part of the process.

Pearce quotes a woman in Cambodia, expelled so a company can grow sugar for export to England:

"Some soldiers came and told me to remove my house, because it was not my land. I said no. I said I would report them to the commune officer. But they just smashed the house down. I built another one, but they burnt that. Then they burned our rice and all our belongings. They offered just a hectare in compensation. But it was sacred forest land, which isn't theirs to give. I can't use that land. I'd be scared to."

Later a man from the same village urges Pearce to not buy sugar, "it's corrupt; it's not clean. People are crying here because they have lost their land."

Land is often given to outside companies and individuals for almost nothing by governments of developing nations desperately hoping that outside capital might trickle down and improve their economies. It rarely does. Sometimes the areas become mere extensions of another country, much like US military bases in the Middle East with their own McDonald's and Starbucks. The Loliondo game reserve in the Serengeti has brought up to offer holidays to rich tourists. Mobile phone signals there welcome you to the United Arab Emirates. A part of Africa has become part of one of the richest nations in the world, a playground for the rich. It should be noted that purchases aren't always multinationals (nor foreign countries) large parts of South America are owned by rich individuals, and the Moonies for instance, own 800,000 hectares of land in Brazil and Paraguay.

The news isn't always bad. Pearce documents the resistance, the protests and the demonstrations that often end in repression, but occasionally do win compensation or force the retreat of a foreign multinational. Often the role of the local state here is to protect the investment of the outsider, brutally attacking its own population.

At the heart of Pearce's critique is an understanding of the way that the profits obtained from multinationals who can grow crops on enormous areas of land grabbed in the developing world, over-ride all other interests. States, locally and far away from the land-grab, facilitate this process as they organise in the interest of the ruling classes and the rich. The weakness of Pearce's book is perhaps the lack of alternative. He does describe how alternate agriculture could easily feed the world, and how industrial farming is the worst possible solution. He also shows how such small scale farming is far better for the environment and significantly better in terms of carbon emissions. But Pearce's doesn't really show how we can stop the capitalist landgrab and return power to local indigenous people. In fact Pearce ends up looking towards enlightened farming (and praises a few examples of positive investment in the developing world) rather than mass movements that could fundamentally challenge the priorities of the system.

Nonetheless, Fred Pearce has provided a very useful book for those trying to understand the modern agricultural world and its interaction with the wider global economy. It is a tragic and sad book, filled with the horrors of displaced people and lost lands. It is a damning indictment of a system organised in the interests of the few rather than the majority. It is a system that Pearce concludes is unable to provide for people today or in the future.

Related Reviews

Pearce - When The Rivers Run Dry
Pearce - PeopleQuake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash
Pearce - The Last Generation
Cronon - Changes in the Land

Related Link

Suzanne Jeffrey speaking on Food, Climate & the New Scramble for Africa at Marxism 2012 in London

Raymond Challinor - The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Essays on the Second World War

Raymond Challinor was a long standing British revolutionary socialist. He was also an accomplished historian, and a brilliant writer. Sadly his work is a little remembered today, which is a tragedy as a new generation of revolutionaries would benefit from reading his insightful essays.

The Struggle for Hearts and Minds is a short collection of essays that span many years of writing and activity. It concentrates on an alternative view of the Second World War, but also addresses questions like the origins of the Cold War. Some of these essays are available on the Marxist Internet Archive, though I would recommend that people get hold of the reprint of this book that came out in 2011.

Some of these essays cover ground taken up by other Angus Calder and Donny Gluckstein's recent book. Challinor's work benefits from the authors deep historical and literary knowledge. Like Gluckstein, Challinor was a Trotskyist, though not an orthodox one. His writings draw both on that revolutionary tradition, but he is not uncritical of Trotsky (and his followers) who in the 1930s and 1940s had expectations that with hindsight look unreasonable. Following on from the experience of 1917, Trotsky expected that a coming world war would lead to revolution. Because it did not happen, it can be easy to smirk at this idea, but Challinor points out that this wasn't an unusal expectation. In 1942 with the fall of Singapore, the British Government was in crisis and George Orwell wrote that "It seems to me that we are back to the 'revolutionary situation' which existed but not utlized after Dunkirk."

Just before war started, in August 1939, at a meeting between French ambassador Coulondre and Adolf Hitler, the Frenchman argued that in the event of war, "[t]he real victor... will be Trotsky". Trotksy himself pointed out that the use of his name was "to give a personal name to the spectre of revolution".

That the revolution didn't come was in part due to the way that working people in countries like Britain were subsumed into the war, partly because so few revolutionaries were arguing that this was a war for capitalism, rather than anti-fascism or democracy. Challinor touches on the craven attitudes of the Communist Party as well as the appalling attitude of the "democratic" nations towards the fledgling Spanish Republic. He also examines the way that internal dissent in the United Kingdom was attacked during the war and, in a brilliant short essay, exposes a possible miscarriage of justice against a seaman and aleged communist George Armstrong. An essay on the experience of working people during the Blitz, contrasting their experience with that of their wealthier compatriots is a centre piece of this excellent work. He even records that the "atistocrats of Scotland's dog kingdom had been evacuated to the United States and the colonies. Not wanting to run the risk of rare strains being wiped out in air raids". Challinor contrasts this with those poor East-Enders who were going to be evacuated to Brighton, "in the front line", until a campaign by a pioneer British Trotskyist Dr. Worrall helped prevent this. Worrall was vindicated when a bomb destroyed a cinema in Brighton and proved the place was no refuge from German attacks.

There is much in this short volume. Challinor's writing is tight and entertaining and every sentence seems loaded with information. If you've never read anything by him, I would suggest that this piece, The Red Mole of History, is an excellent place to start. I'd then recommend getting hold of The Struggle for Hearts and Minds.

Related Reviews

Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War
Calder - The Myth of the Blitz
Calder - The People's War

Richard Morgan - Black Man

Somehow I'd missed Richard Morgan's science fiction novel Black Man. Perhaps this was because his previous book Market Forces didn't quite get me. It was a little too violent, a little too full of detailed sex scenes and less coherent than some of his other writings.

Black Man however is very much a return to form. Like Market Forces it is set in the not to distant future, one which extrapolates from our current world to paint a nasty dirty picture of a future where neo-liberal politics and market forces have let rip. The United States has been torn asunder, ripped into two halves roughly matching the demarcation of the north-south states of the American Civil War. One might also say its been broken up under the pressure of its own contradictions.

Mars has been terraformed. Its a destination for those who have something to escape on earth, or dreams of striking it rich. Unfortunately, Mars, like Earth is dominated by multinationals who's exploitation of their workers allows few to actually "make it".

Into this bleak future, Morgan injects constant conflict. Multinational forces vie with government troops to control regions, resources and workers. There is an ever present war between the new super-power, China and one or other of the old US nations. But, as Morgan points out, China is happier to let her economic muscle and hard cash buy her interests abroad, rather than escalating into open conflict.

The titular Black Man is Carl Marsalis. He is a "twist" in the near racist slang of the time. Properly known as a "thirteen" he is a genetically enhanced human, a throwback to an earlier human psyche. He's a contract killer, a murderer for hire and his genetic improvements give him superhuman speed and violence. Released from a southern goal for financing an illegal abortion he's given a mission to track down another Thirteen who has escaped from Mars and is committing apparently random serial killings around the United States.

This might seem like fairly standard SF fare. But Morgan weaves a complex set of ideas and characters into the plot. But at heart, what dominates the story is the interaction between private business interests, the sometimes competing interests of various states and the political context of this future. Black Man doesn't simply refer to the underground nature of Marsalis' work. But also to his skin colour and Morgan illustrates this by exploring future racism, as well as contemporary attitudes to Islam (one of Marsalis' key colleagues is a Muslim woman).

As with some of his earlier works, Morgan is concerned about the unbalanced, exploitative nature of capitalism and the way it distorts and destroys lives. At one key point in the book, when Marsalis is facing down another thirteen who claims to have a gun that he took "from a man I killed", Marsalis monologues:

"Oh, well there's a sustainable model of exchange. Did you kill the guy who served you breakfast this morning as well, so you wouldn't have to pay for that either? Going to murder the guy who sold or rented you your transport option and the guy who runs the place you sleep tonight? Got plans for the people who employ them too, the ones who run the means of production, the managers and the owners and the people who sell for them and the people who buy from them?"

Such marxism-lite is a feature of Morgan's work. While it isn't that unusual in SF to find radical ideas, but I like to think that a book that references Tariq Ali and Susan Faludi in its acknowledgements is reflecting the wider questioning of capitalism that is taking place around the world.

To those who are drawing anti-capitalist conclusions, Morgan doesn't offer any collective solutions. In fact the opposite, his characters' violence is very much a personalised settling of scores. Nonetheless Morgan's vision of a future of war, racism, islamaphobia and multinational exploitation on multiple planets is one that surly inspires us to revolution today in order to avoid it.

Related Reviews

Morgan - Woken Furies
Morgan - Market Forces

George Johnson - The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

Early in the 1800s, just after the French Revolution, Benjamin Thompson who was know as Count Rumford created an ingenious experiment to help demonstrate that heat was work. Having noticed that the boring of cannon generated heat;

"he submerged a cannon in water and harnessed two horses to turn the bit. The water go hotter and hotter until after two and a half hours it came to a boil 'merely by the strength of a horse, without either fire, light, combustion, or chemical decomposition."

Important though this experiment was (it helped disabuse the idea that material contained something called "caloric" that was released, creating heat) it isn't one of the ten most beautiful experiments within this book. However George Johnson uses it to illustrate the many stages that science goes through before reaching a moment of scientific breakthrough. In fact, one of the strengths of this book is the way it demonstrates that genius rarely develops in isolation. Scientists, no matter how brilliant, build on the work of others. Even if that work is incorrect it is a useful base on which to build greater understanding.

Perhaps the best chapter in this book is the first in which Johnson examines Galileo's work with an inclined plane. This simple experiment allowed the scientist to demonstrate the nature of acceleration. Here Galileo combines flashes of insight with wonderful innovation. In order to measure the rate of acceleration, he came up with bells to ring, mechanisms to pour water and possibly needed the singing of songs. Galileo was building on the work of earlier scientists, but his genius was to do so critically. Pushing aside the accepted science that had been handed down Aristotle, this work of Galileo's was according to Johnson his "strongest claim to greatness... long before his troubles with the Vatican."

Some argue it didn't actually take place but was more of a thought experiment. But in a piece of research almost as brilliant as some of the other examples of science in this book, Johnson describes the work of one Stillman Drake who painstakingly recreated tables of numbers from Galileo's mass of papers to show that the original scientist had indeed repeatedly performed the experiment, scratching out errors and playing with the numbers until he reached his final result.

It is probably a result of the nature of particular science that most of the experiments in here are physics based. Indeed of the two biological chapters, one on William Harvey's work on the heart and blood circulation seems to me to barely qualify as an experiment. The other, Pavlov's work with dog's instinctive behaviour and conditional responses is  a series of extended experiments that build up a case gradually. This chapter is particularly interesting as Pavlov's work is oft quoted but little understood.

Any book of this type is in a sense arbitrary. Who can say what a beautiful experiment is, and why it is more beautiful than another? But there is some interesting stuff here. I am not convinced that the experiments chosen (most of which are from the nineteenth and twentieth century) are more beautiful than modern science. Johnson argues that contemporary work is dominated by work with multiple scientists but I don't think this makes it any less inspiring or exciting. Beautiful experiments don't all have to involve a lone scientist hanging wires from ceilings and bolting brass instruments to tables.

More problematic is Johnson's style. Unfortunately in places brevity leads to confusion. Very occasionally Johnson's descriptions are very unclear. His one paragraph description of Fizeau's experimental calculation of the speed of light left me confused (and I'm university qualified in physics!) and I had to resort to youtube to get an inkling of what he meant.

Still this mildly diverting book will interest those who want to understand the scientific process without feeling they've got to learn too much science. Hopefully it will encourage further reading on some of these topics and possibly stimulate a few future experimenteers.

Related Reviews

Sobel - Galileo's Daughter

Philip José Farmer - The Magic Labyrinth

Volume four of Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series begins with a short author's forward, "Now ends the Riverworld series, all loose ends tied together into a sword-resisting Gordian knot, all the human mysteries revealed, the millions of miles of The River and the many years of quests and The Quest completed."

Its a short, neatly worded foreword that is only undermined by the fact that it is entirely a lie. The Magic Labyrinth was clearly intended to be the last in the series tying up the loose ends, but after rambling on for almost five hundred pages, Farmer clearly had no idea how to finish it. It finishes, rather abruptly (and slightly bewilderingly for those of us who had taken the foreword literally) and the reader must get hold of the final volume.

At the centre of the book is a climatic and rather well written battle between two enormous riverboats that have been questing along The River. The Riverworld is a place of resurrection, were every human ever to reach adulthood awakens. On the Riverworld, at least initially, those who die are resurrected elsewhere on the enormous planet. That is until the resurrections fail.

Farmer's heroes are well-known historical figures. Richard Burton with his lover Alice Liddel. Mark Twain and King John of England are just some that make an appearance in this volume. Their quest is very much to find the purpose of the Riverworld. If we are honest, finding out Farmer's explanation for the almighty conundrum is the reason most readers will have stuck with him until book four. Sadly few will be reading this for Farmer's prose (which is stilted) or his philosophical meanderings. His ruminations on the nature of "self" form an important part of the story, but need not have taken up page after page of monologue. Despite the wealth of material he has to work with, Farmer often fails to flesh out his characters and has a tendency to drop them of a cliff at a moments notice for no apparent reason. I am sceptical that the final book in this series will be an improvement (which is a shame as volumes one and two had great promise).

Related Reviews

Farmer - To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Farmer - The Fabulous Riverboat
Farmer - The Dark Design

Norman Stone - The Eastern Front 1914-1917

Here in western Europe we are apt to forget that both World Wars took place over a vast expanse of the globe. In particular World War One is often discussed in terms of the great battles at The Somme, Verdun or Passchendaele. Of the numerous books devoted to World War One that I've seen in English almost none of them deal with the enormous conflict that took place on the Eastern Front as Russia clashed with Germany and Austro-Hungary.

 Norman Stone's book then is very important as it is one of the few that look in any detail at the events that took place in the east during World War One. However its significance is far more than this, because these events helped shape the one of the great events of modern history, the Russian Revolution.

Stone's history is mostly a military one. In places his detailed reconstruction of events, with explanations of the different movements of regiments, divisions and armies is almost tiresome. For those not versed in military tactics some of the descriptions of the preparations for battle and the engagements themselves will be impossible to follow. Nonetheless there are sections of great fascination and insight. 

One of Stone's themes is that the shape of the war, on a macro and micro scale was determined by wider changes taking place within Russia. While I don't think that Stone is close to being a Marxist politically, his understanding of the social and economic tensions within Russian society would be close to some of those on the left who have analysed Russian history.

In analysing why the Revolution took place, Stone writes:

"This economic chaos was frequently ascribed quite simply to backwardness: Russia was not advanced enough to stand the strain of a war... But economic backwardness did not alone make for revolution, as the examples of Romania or Bulgaria showed... The economic chaos came more from a contest between old and new in the Russian economy."

This battle between "old and new" shaped more than the economy. It shaped different attitudes to the way that military production took place - the Tsar wanted production through state factories, but emerging capitalists wanted to make profits. As a result goods cost more and more as profits boomed during wartime. More importantly however, the old and new played out in the military leadership. 

As with elsewhere in World War One almost no-one understood in August 1914 the way that the war would play out. Russian commanders as with their counter-parts in the west and the central powers imagined a brief conflict. In fact, in Russia early conflicts were fought much in the way of battles of the 19th century. Stone recounts one engagement between Russian cavalry and their enemy taking place as though the 20th century hadn't happened. The Austro-Hungarian horsemen in this conflict being almost unable to ride as they'd taken their dress saddles in order to look good as they rode. A detachment of infantry broke the sabre duel up with rifle fire and presumably the commanders were dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century.

The Russian army was beset more than most by backward looking and incompetent military leadership. Many of the generals were Tsarist appointees and even when they failed they were frequently promoted due to friends at court. Their leadership was often further undermined because of personal feuds or communications failure. In one conflict in 1915 the fortress at Libau was evacuated by Russian troops in the face of a German threat. As the Russians left, cutting the telegraph cables, a second Russian army was sent in to defend the base. In the confusion, the Germans occupied.

The chaos described by Stone is not of course limited to Russia. Austro-Hungary in particular had its own share of idiotic and unprepared commanders. The tragedy of course, is that this lack of leadership lead to enormous casualties. When the commanders got it right (in terms of military organisation) they often were younger men, with different ideas and experiences. Interestingly Stone notes that many of the most successful commanders were to take their experiences into the Red Army in 1919 and help Trotsky to defeat the Whites during the Civil War that followed the Revolution.

Much of the blame for failures by the Russian army were put at the feet of the Russian economy. Failed military campaigns were often blamed on the lack of shells for the artillery. Stone argues that this was not the case, and convincingly shows the way that failure was more to do with the inept leadership and bad military organisation. He also argues though, that while "virtually all sectors of the economy grew.... their growth was not even and a series of bottle-necks threw the economy into chaos as it encountered them. The Tsarist regime had little idea as to how such crisis might be surmounted, and in any case they provoked the final crisis of an already badly-strained society."

Stone's book is not without faults. Though some are not of his making. Written in 1975 it suffers from lack of access to the Russian archives and could well do with an update. However, Stone underplays the role of the revolutionary movement in helping to shape the revolutionary movement. His analysis rightly doesn't put the success of the revolutionary solely on the base of military and economic crisis, but he does say that the Bolsheviks had limited support amongst the front-line troops. For him the revolution was more a result of the particular way the crisis played out and the way that Lenin was able to offer hope to the masses of Russian society. But this is contradicted by the example of Germany where a revolutionary situation arose in a similar way, but the lack of mass revolutionary socialist organisations did not lead to the establishment of soviet power.

Stone's book nonetheless is not meant to be a serious examination of the Russian Revolution, but a study of a near forgotten part of World War One. In this it succeeds admirably and socialists will gain much from reading it, as a background to a deeper understanding of the events of 1917.

Related Reviews

Tuchman - The Guns of August

Roger Hutchinson - The Soap Man: Lewis, Harris & Lord Leverhulme

Part history and part biography, The Soap Man is an impressive account of the clash of two modes of production. Lord Leverhulme the industrialist of Port Sunlight fame was a classic example of the capitalist who believed that organised correctly and benevolently the system could bring happiness, wealth and employment for all.

Having made his fortune creating a model (or so he thought) community near Liverpool whose workers toiled in his soap factories, Leverhulme's gaze turned elsewhere. In 1918 he bought the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The act of purchase wasn't simply about owning the land. The old semi-feudal laws that still existed in the Isles meant that Leverhulme effectively became the owner of everything on the Island, towns, roads, people. The new Laird was determined that Lewis would be remodelled in the image of Port Sunlight. He dreamed of technology and capitalism reinventing the Island, creating enormous amounts of wealth and dragging the people of Lewis out of the dark ages.

Roger Hutchinson speculates that Leverhulme wasn't so much the benevolent capitalist as a clear thinking man of money who recognised, at least in part, that the gigantic turmoil that had shaken Russia at the end of World War One would have its echo even in far flung bits of Britain. His desire to improve the lot of the workers, was less about helping them and more about stemming the tide of revolution. But he also viewed the islands with pounds signs in his eyes. In Leverhulme's vision the old crofting way of life should be destroyed so that the true wealth of the island, as a source of wood, a base for fishing and growing industrial quantities of fruit, could make him even wealthier. There would, naturally be a trickle down effect and the people of the island would benefit, as would the thousands of other workers that would stream into the cities and towns that would spring up on the beautiful island.

The problem was, that the people of the island, in particular the returning soldiers and sailors wanted nothing more than a piece of land to call there own. The 1886 Crofters Act had indeed promised them this and offered, for the first time, in a bleak and difficult history, security of tenure that their ancestors could only have imagined. Free from eviction they would be free to farm as they wanted.

Leverhulme couldn't see this. To him, these were backward people, living the lives of savages and this needed to be uprooted. To the crofters and their representatives, who initially welcomed him with open arms. his schemes were interesting, but not for them. They wanted land. Hutchinson has unearthed some extraordinary accounts of the clash between the people and their landlord.

The seen is early in the morning, a large group of people, Leverhulme is at the centre. He speaks in English through an interpretater. Most of the assembled group only speak Gailec. Many of them had taken part in raids only the day before to seize land for their families.

Speaking through an interpretor to a crowd of crofters, Leverhulme derides their way of life:

"The fact is, your fishing is presently carried on is a hit or miss. I want to make it a hit every time. How can I do that? Well everytime you now put to sea you blindly hope to strike a shoal of herrings. Sometimes you do. Oftener you don't. But there shoals are there if you only know the spot. and that is were I can help you. I am prepared to supply a fleet of airplans and observers who will scan the sea in cricles around the island. An observer from one of these planes cannot fail to notice a shoal o herrings over which he passes. Immeiately he sends a wireless message.... the boats are headed for that spot and next morning they steam back to port loaded with herrings......"

Alan Martin "a prominent raider" who had been organising the occupation of land. spoke next. In Gaelic, for a long time. Leverhulme's translator explained the speech, which finished like this.

"This will not do. This honey mouthed man would have us believe black is white and white is black. We are not concerned with his fancy dreams that may or may not come true. What we want is the land and the question I put to him now is; will you give us the land?"

To which Leverhulme answers, "No. I am not prepared to give you the land."

A former serviceman, MacLeod spoke next at length, his speech finished like this:

"Lord Leverhulme, you have bought this island. But you have not bought us. We refuse to be the bondslaves of any man. We want to live our own lives in our own way, poor in material things it may be, but at least it will be clear of the fear of the factory bell; it will be free and independent"

 Here, summed up is the clash between two modes of production. On the one hand a way of life that brings little riches, but has existed for hundreds of years, that provides for the needs of people and would give happiness. On the other is the desire to exploit the natural resources of Lewis in the interest of making money. Leverhulme's cannot understand why the crofters won't accept his changes, because he viewed 20th century capitalism as the pinnacle of human achievement.

At one point, he refuses his personal piper holiday leave, because the man wanted to go home to his croft and plant potatoes. He explained that with his wage labour on the estate he could buy all the potatoes he wanted. When the farmer went home unofficially to do his work, Leverhulme sacked him. A further example of this is the response of a few crofters who were taken to Port Sunlight to see the bright opportunities offered by capitalism. While polite to Leverhulme during their visit on their return they described Port Sunlight as having "nothing but slavery there".

Leverhulme was seeing the world through rose tinted glasses. The fishing off Lewis was not as good as he imagined. The opportunities to grow soft fruits like raspberries for export was limited by the prevailing weather on Lewis. But Leverhulme was a man used to getting his way; nature could be bent by modern technology and economics.

Leverhulme may be portrayed as a kindly philanthropist. But in reality he was a ruthless capitalist. He was also unused to resistance and the refusal of the Islanders to accept his schemes. Their continued occupation of the lands, their anger at his behaviour and their natural cynicism towards landlords frustrated Leverhulme. But so did the British Government, who found Leverhulme's semi-feudal behaviour an embarrassment. As economic crisis arrived and Leverhulmes plans became even more untenable. He gradually withdrew from the islands and the crofters gradually got their way.

Today, Hutchinson tells us, the islands are owned by a myriad of landlords. But there are many memorials to those who occupied land and refused to let the dream die. Their hope that they could obtain "security of their children's children at peace on the soil of thei island" was to a certain extent realised.

This short book is a wonderful piece of history well deserved of its accolades. There is probably no better guide to the history of Lewis and Harris and visitors to the Outer Hebridies could do far worse than read this on their travels. As a record of a unique period of Scottish social history it deserves a wider readership.

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Richards - The Highland Clearances

Andrew Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

Capitalism is a fossil fuel system. For historical as well as economic and physical reasons fossil fuels have fuelled the system's accumulation of wealth. However none of these resources are infinite and as oil in particular becomes increasingly difficult to extract the question of how to fuel the system becomes more and more important. So important is oil, that as one expert points out in this book, a super-tanker must arrive at a US port every four hours.

One solution not discussed in this book is a rapid and immediate shift to renewable energy. A number of studies have been done that demonstrate that this is both viable and possible. I won't rehearse these arguments here but direct interested readers to this article.

Another answer (one favoured by the fossil fuel companies themselves) is to find alternate sources of fossil fuels. Andrew Nikiforuk's important book examines one of the most controversial (and I would argue dangerous) sources of the new "extreme energy" - the tar sands. In particular he concentrates on the tar sands of Alberta, Canada.

His story is one that brings together current environmental disaster, with government mismanagement, corporate greed, corruption, destruction on an enormous scale and future climate change. It is not an easy read because it is a horrific example of the way that corporations place their short-term profits ahead of people and planet. But more than this, it is a demonstration of the way that the system itself is geared towards encouraging this. Rather than being a restraining block on the corporate destruction of the environment in Alberta, local and national government has enthusiastically assisted. Sadly this isn't simply a result of particularly bad Canadian politicians (though they clearly are). Nikiforuk demonstrates the way that oil rich nations historically have followed the same path, one that gradually reduces restraints on fossil fuel companies at the same time as simultaneously undermining democratic rights.

This is one of those books that are hard to review because you feel obliged to get across dozens of facts to the casual reader. My copy is crisscrossed with pencil marks because I felt every salient point needed to be noted and remembered. For this reason I encourage people to buy or borrow the book as my review cannot do justice. But I want to use a few examples.

Firstly the tar sands are an enormous reservoir of fossil fuel. Readers in the UK or Europe may have no idea of the scale. Nikiforuk points out that the "megaproject will eventually destroy or industrialize a forest the size of Florida". The attraction of the tar sands to the oil companies has brought enormous investment (some $200 billion so far). The high cost in part lies in the remoteness of the locations, in part because of the difficulty of extracting usable oil from the tar sands themselves.

Two tons of earth have to be dug out of the ground to make a single barrel of bitumen. Extracting it requires lots of energy and lots of water. In fact, for every barrel of bitumen companies need to use three of fresh water. Needless to say the water is rarely if ever left clean enough to be used again. As rivers dry up poisonous tailings pools surround mining areas, killing plants and animals and threatening to leak into water systems. The scale of this is unbelievable, Nikiforuk quotes one ecologist pointing out that a century ago, all water in Alberta was drinkable but now "all water is non-potable and must be chemically treated" (p79)

The companies involved like to tell the world that this will not destroy the planet. But it is already doing so and not simply because of deforestation and polluted streams. "Each barrel of bitumen produces three times as much greenhouse gas as a barrel of conventional oil". One company (Imperial Oil) wanted to produce four open-pit mines which would produce more greenhouse gas emissions than 800,000 cars. Unsurprisingly Canada's emissions of greenhouse gases in 2004 were up, 51% on 1990. No wonder Canada felt obliged to pull out of the Kyoto treaty.

It gets worse. The area being destroyed by the tar sands extraction is one of the world's most important "sinks" for carbon dioxide. As Nikiforuk points out, "excavating one of Canada's best carbon sinks and weather stabilizers to produce a product with three times the carbon footprint of conventional oil may be an example of global freak economics.

Freak economics it certainly is. Tar sands can in no way prevent peak oil. At best it can slow down the decline very briefly. But even then few in Canada are seeing the benefit. The main beneficiary is the US which gets the oil it needs and frequently does so with subsidisation from Canadian tax dollars. Rarely however do those tax dollars come from the oil companies themselves, who, as the author points out, have lived a life of ease through handouts and deals that mean little of the profits they make from the destroying the country feed back into government coffers.

There is much more to this book. The impact on human health for instance, the appalling destruction of life that takes place when oil towns flourish and cast aside men and women through drink, drugs and workplace accidents or the cancers that arise from the pollution. Nikiforuk is particularly good on demonstrating the way that the Canadian government has become implicit in the tar sands exploitation, as well as the lies that are used to demonstration that tar sands are not destructive, and good for the economy.

Having lauded this book enough I want to make a few criticisms. The first of these is the lack of detailed footnotes. While there is an extensive bibliography the author and publishers have chosen not to footnote the text.This means that we cannot be sure of the source of any of the figures quoted (including the ones I've used in this review). This is a shame because as is made clear in the afterword the book has come under criticism from those in the oil industry and government and with material like this one needs to be confident of sources.

Secondly and far more importantly, Nikiforuk does not argue that the bitumen needs to be left in the ground. I think that this is a crucial position that environmentalists, radicals and activists must take with regard to extreme energy. If we are to stop runaway climate change we cannot burn this oil. We have to find alternate ways of fuelling our economy. The risk is summed up by James Hansen who pointed out in the NY Times that;

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.

Hansen argues that it would be "game over" if the tar sands are extracted. Nikiforuk instead argues that there need to be caps on production from the tar sands and a gradual wind down of the use of fuel from the tar sands. "If North America's cars and trucks are still running on bitumen in 2030, both Canada and the United States will have failed as modern states" he says.

I'd argue that if that's the case in 2030 millions of people will already have died. Andrew Nikiforuk probably argues like this because he feels it is pragmatic, that people want to find a way out that works within the context of the system he has so ably critiqued. Unfortunately everything that he has written demonstrates how unlikely it is that the oil barons and their friends in government are to willingly enact such changes, without significant popular mobilisations against them.

The problem I think lies with Nikiforuk's location of the problem. He understand that the system is wrong. But the blame partly lies, he argues, with consumers who use the fuel. As he says "Every Canadian who drives a car is part of this political emergency. And every Canadian can be part of the solution". Later he repeats this line of thought; "Every time I fill up my tank I'm supporting the First Law of Petropolitics and its corrupt morality....I'm spending my children's inheritance... I'm subsidizing the drug trade... I'm exterminating woodland caribou... etc".

Given the scale of the problem and the power of those corporations and governments who have created this mess I'd argue that Nikiforuk is wrong here. North American car and lorry drivers use their vehicles because the system they live in has destroyed public transport infrastructure in the interest of the automobile industry. They are the victims of the system not part of the problem. Nikiforuk is right that car drivers (alongside the majority of other people in Canada) are part of the solution. But that solution lies in a fundamental reshaping of the economy in the interest of people and planet, not the oil companies. Sadly Nikiforuk has made no attempt to demonstrate how Canada could use renewable energy, nor how (for instance) emissions could be reduced by the improvement of public transport. The lack of this alternative undermines the confidence readers might have in the potential alternatives.

If I had one final critique of the book, it would be that it needs to be more anti-capitalist. Few books have for me demonstrated so well the way that the system itself is the problem environmentally, a system that binds state and capital close together in the quest to accumulate wealth. I think many readers of Tar Sands will come away agreeing with this and I would argue that the logical conclusion of Nikiforuk's book is that we need to overthrow that system. It is disappointing that his conclusions are less radical.

That said this is a book that should be read by every Canadian. But it should also be read widely everywhere else as the vast majority of us have no idea of the scale of tar sands destruction. Here in the UK we have our own version of extreme energy - fracking. I'd venture that many of the trends that Nikiforuk highlights will be mirrored in that appalling industry. His book is an insight into the destructive power of the oil industry and the worrying future for all of us if those companies, big and small, aren't stopped.

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Neil Gaiman - Smoke and Mirrors

Regular readers of the blog will know that I've recently fallen in love with the novels of Neil Gaiman. I certainly rank American Gods as one of the best works of fantasy I have ever read. Having exhausted Gaiman's novels I recently picked up this collection of short stories and was very interested with how he would handle the genre. Gaiman's novels tend to be large. Their complex characters and story lines needing time to develop. This might mean that short stories wouldn't work so well.

Reviewing collections of short stories is difficult. Its hard enough to mention stories without giving away the tale and a few duff stories in a collection can obscure some real gems. I have to say that the stories in this book are good with some absolute crackers and a couple of stinkers. And too much poetry. However all the stories (with the exception of the poetry) are fun and some are very original indeed. I particularly liked the story of the old lady who finds the Holy Grail in a second-hand shop (a metaphor for where I found the book I suppose). I also liked the story of the troll who waits under a bridge for a boy to return. At different stages of the boys life as he grows older, he finds the troll and bargains for his life.

Several of the stories rely heavily on other authors. Shoggoth's Old Peculiar is the story of an American tourist discovering the lack of joys in English seaside towns. Without giving too much away, fans of HP Lovecraft will get it faster than most. The stories are very English. One of the best is the tale of a English writer sucked into the bizarre world of Hollywood, which has a lovely touching ending. Rather oddly, Gaiman places himself in some of the stories, or at least a character based on him. Some people might find this a bit strange and I didn't really like it. Smoke and Mirrors is probably not the best place to start with if you want to read Neil Gaiman. But if you like the fantasy genre and aren't put off by the short-story format, you'll probably find something in here for you. Though skip the poetry.

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Theodore Plievier - Stalingrad

After reading Stalingrad it seems inadequate to describe the battle in the way so many military histories do. While it was "the turning point of the war" and "Germany's greatest defeat" this ignores the immense waste of human life, the incredible suffering, the brutality, the bravery and the pointlessness of the battle. Stalingrad is not an easy book to read. In part because Plievier spares the reader nothing in his descriptions of war and the consequences of war. But the novel, like its sequel, Berlin does not follow a normal narrative. Plievier's prose is powerful, florid and complicated at times. It is a shame that he's forgotton today as his books repay reading.

Plievier was no veteran of World War Two though his story is fascinating. As a young sailor He'd taken part in the Wilhelmshaven mutiny that had detonated the German Revolution and ended World War One. After the rise of Hitler he fled, eventually ending up in Russia. From there he wrote about World War II and the interviews he made with German soldiers and his experiences on the front line formed the documentary basis for his classic trilogy of World War II.

Stalingrad is the first of three novels. It depicts the battle from the Germany point of view, focusing on a few individuals who experience the war in very different ways. Ultimately the destruction and violence degrades and destroys them. One of the soldiers, Gnotke, is a member of a punishment troop given the most dangerous tasks. Him and his comrades lose their minds as they constantly bury the dead in the face of withering fire.

Little of the book is devoted to narrative. Most of the story is a series of experiences, vividly painted, as the end of the Sixth Army approaches. Large parts deal with the appalling casualties, the wounded and their suffering as they wait for treatment, for water, for painkillers. None of these are forthcoming and Plievier's account of the suffering of the few doctors who operate on wounded men without bandages, morphine or hope is truly awful.

One of the themes of the book is the failure of the German High Command who can only order the besieged troops to continue fighting till the last bullet. As the Germany Army faces its first significant defeat, the leadership is unable to follow the most logical military tactics. The Nazi command doesn't allow for rational decisions. For Hitler and his cronies defeat at Stalingrad can only be the fault of the army in the field rather than illogical and impossible aims and ambitions. The men who freeze to death in Russia and the senior Officers who are near mad with blind faith in their Fuhrer are the victims.

The book concludes with the appalling march of the tens of thousands of German POWs into Russia's interior. Few returned. Plievier draws parallels with the Nazi death marches of Jews and concentration camp inmates as one of the POWs was a guard on such a march. This soldier believes that what is happening to him and the German Army are retribution for the acts of the regime and his own personal crimes. In a sense this is correct, but it is only a foreshadow of what is to come.

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