Reviews Articles
‘The Time for Peace is Now: Gospel music about us’ – Various Artists
When Pops Staples first got his family together to sing it was at his brother’s church. It was 1948, with all that meant for a black musical group in the USA, even one touring churches: segregation, harrassment and worse. But one of those churches was Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in...
‘Peace Camping: A history’ by Michael Waugh
In his many years of campaigning against nuclear weapons, Michael Waugh has taken part in a large number of Peace Camps, some well known and some barely known beyond the activist community. He has established a reputation for encyclopaedic knowledge of the peace movement, which has led him to put...
Understanding, Nurturing and Working Effectively with Vulnerable Children in Schools by Angela Green
As a tutor on our Area Meeting’s ‘Peaceful Schools’ project I found a lot of parallels with the work of Quaker Angela Greenwood. We Friends have been talking a lot about the need to really hear what others are saying, rather than just reacting to attitudes and behaviour we...
‘The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code’ by Judith Hoare
This is the story of the Australian doctor Claire Weekes (1903-1990). It is fascinating. Weekes was first a zoologist, specialising in the development of the placenta in mammals, for which she received a doctorate in science. She found a species of lizard which sometimes laid eggs and sometimes gave birth...
‘The Offbeat Bible: The old stories retold’, by Paul Hunt
Modernisations of Bible stories go back, in English, at least to the eighth-century Dream of the Rood, in which the Crucifixion is narrated by the cross itself. Before the Reformation, such rewritings, supplementing the sketchy narratives of the Bible, generally aimed to increase the readers’/hearers’ devotion. Now the picture...
‘Berlin to London: An emotional history of two refugees’ by Esther Saraga
One might think the market is flooded with books about and by refugees, but this one is an exceptional treat. It is a combination of a couple’s personal story (Wolja and Lotte) and a context reseached meticulously by their daughter, Esther Saraga.
‘Gandhi the Organiser. How he shaped a nationwide rebellion: India 1915-1922’ by Bob Overy
Advices & queries enjoins us to live ‘in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars’. But however well-intentioned we might be, our everyday lives are enmeshed within institutions and structures that sow the seeds of war. Furthermore, while we might be able...
‘The Education of an Idealist’, by Samantha Power
In Australia, the word ‘idealist’ has connotations of inevitable failure. In the US, people are more accommodating. ‘It is perfectly reasonable to build castles in the air,’ they assure us, ‘you just have to put foundations under them.’ Although born in Ireland, Samantha Power’s family moved to the USA...
‘Embodiment’, by Dinah Livingstone
The very last line of this celebratory collection of poems reads, ‘Thank you, Life!’ The fact that the poet puts the ‘L’ in uppercase suggests that she wants to personify life, to make it a person with whom one can relate. In the mystical vision of Saint John Jesus calls...
‘Father Christmas and the Gift of Light,’ by Stephen Sayers (illustrated by Swea Sayers)
Dressed in cola red with a plastic face, Santa Claus offers commercial joy. The white-bearded old man of legend bestows gifts from teddy bears to computer fantasy worlds. This old tale – a fiction masquerading as fact for small children to believe – encourages parents to buy and buy, and already rich...