Tag: CD Reviews

The authors tell us this book has been “a long time in the making.” It has been well worth the wait. The dust jacket bears endorsements, fulsome even by the necessities of the medium, from four distinguished scholars and writers, David Harvey among them. Living next door to the United

Bilbo Baggins is the main character in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, but contrary to what you’d think, the movie isn’t really about him. Nor is it about Gollum—neither because of his true delightfulness nor his long stewardship of the One Ring. (Gandalf, the consummate geopolitician, puller of strings—the guy Henry

Like just about everyone who has seen it, I was enthralled by Lincoln, the Hollywood film directed with authority and creative license by Stephen Spielberg, smoothly scripted by Tony Kushner and crowned by a veritable feast of brilliant acting. But in my case, as the author of 40 books on

Chalk it up as a point of
Canadian smugness: that
undiluted avarice sloshing
around the American
financial sector circa
2008 proved to be caustic
stuff, valiantly sniffed
out and tempered on this
side of the border by our
sober breed of bankers
and bro…

Like its name, and unlike Wikileaks that is known mostly through its founder Julian Assange, the hactivist group Anonymous is not easily tied to any particular individual. Operating in semi-clandestine conditions, its members have only made public appearances behind the famous V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes masks. Opening last Friday

The Harper Conservatives are going to great lengths to highlight the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, when the British and Americans fought for control over the north. It is in this context that James Laxer has published his history of the war. Laxer places explicit focus upon the

Montréal -based activist Stefan Christoff sits onstage at a wooden bench in La Sala Rossa on The Main. A small crowd has gathered on a chilly Sunday evening in April. The show is starting late. A lanky, bespectacled man in his thirties, Christoff wears all black from his shoes to

Contains plot spoilers. Since we will not learn in school the lessons about the 1% we ought to know, many of us rely on movies and TV, so that through images and sound we can form ideas of who the men were who screwed up our economy. In Arbitrage, we

Batman: A Tale of Two Gothams “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was

“There’ll be no shelter here! The frontline is everywhere!” screams Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de le Rocha in the single “No Shelter.” The song, featured on the 1998 Godzilla movie soundtrack, is a stinging critique of American cultural imperialism in general and the influence of popular media like

It has been a painfully long time since the opinion poll was fully assimilated into Canadian political life. In the arid and austere years of the 1980s, both federal parties began to outlay heaps of money to commission pollsters (an originally pejorative term) to not measure but control public opinion.

Published within a year of the historic protests in Madison against Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting legislation, the essays collected in Wisconsin Uprising offer diverse, insightful perspectives on the events that took place in the winter and spring of 2011, as well as analyses of the protests’ implications for the labor

From 1944 through 2007, politics in Saskatchewan was dominated by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor the New Democratic Party (NDP). But the NDP was soundly defeated by Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party in 2007 and routed in 2011. Today they hold only nine seats in the legislature. The

When I went to the 2009 Labor Notes ‘Trouble Makers’ conference in Dearborn Michigan I never expected to be thrown into the middle – quite literally – of a dispute between the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the California Nurses Association (CNA). But this is exactly what happened when

Ian Angus and Simon Butler ’s new book about population control, or “populationism” in the widest sense, is invaluable for people concerned about climate change, climate justice, environmental racism, and system change. Angus and Butler are clear about the urgency of drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and that there is

I first heard about Deep Green Resistance in the middle of a grassroots fight to stop a huge vacationhome subdivision at a wilderness park on Vancouver Island. Back then, it hadn’t occurred to me that a book on environmental strategy was needed. Now I can tell you, it’s urgent. Deep

Industrialized economies have grown most years since the mid-19th century. Globally, economic output per person increased tenfold between 1900 and 2000. Richard Heinberg says that this long run of economic growth is reaching an end owing to a number of factors: depletion of fossil fuels, minerals and fresh water; the

By the end of this century, coral reef ecosystems will very likely be extinct. Think about the magnitude of that statement for a minute, requests ecologist and coral reef expert Peter F. Sale in Our Dying Planet. Describing coral reefs as “the canary in the environmental coal mine,” Sale argues