Political Action

• Therese Jennissen and Colleen Lundy
• Wilfred Laurier Univeristy Press, 2011
• Paperback, 398 pages
• 9781554584863

• Dan Savage (editor)
• Dutton, 2011
• Hardcover, 352 pages
• 9780525952336

• Sean Mills
• McGill-Queens 2011
• Paperback, 303 pages
• 9780773536951

• Guerin, Daniel
• AK Press; 2001
• Paperback; 298
• 9781873176696

This is the second volume of Guerin's anthology of Anarchism. Book 2 includes work from the likes of Malatesta, Emile Henry, Augustin Souchy, Gaston Leval, Voline, the Kronstadt sailors, Buenaventura Durruti and Emma Goldman.

About the Author

Daniel Guerin was a French anarchist and gay activist. He was a prolific writer. Several of his works have been translated into English, including Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, Fascism and Big Business and Class Struggle in the French Republic.

• Guerin, Daniel
• AK Press; 1998
• Paperback; 294
• 9781873176641

• Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker & Ezra Winton
• McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010
• Paperback, 574 pages
• 9780773536630

Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada is a 600-page collection of historic and contemporary articles and essays about Challenge for Change/Société Nouvelle (CFC/SN), one of the NFB's most famous and controversial initiatives.

The activist documentary program, which ran from 1967 to 1980, produced almost 250 films and videos in both French and English. It generated a particularly influential and original part of the National Film Board of Canada's acclaimed body of work, and its filmmakers were among the first to exploit portable video. CFC/SN challenged audiences, subjects and filmmakers to confront a wide spectrum of issues, from poverty to sexism to marginalization, with the intention of developing community and political awareness, as well as empowering Canadians.

Pioneering participatory, social change-oriented media, the program had a national and international impact on documentary filmmaking, yet this book is the first comprehensive history and analysis of the venture. The volume's contributors examine dozens of films produced by the program, delving into their themes, aesthetics and politics, and they evaluate CFC/SN's place in Canadian, Québécois and world cinema.

• Saul D. Alinsky
• Vintage Books, 1989
• Paperback, 196 pages
• 9780679721130

The father of modern community organization, Saul Alinsky taught a generation of activists and politicians how to effectively construct social change. In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky writes with passion and intelligence, carefully outlining “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.”  Indispensable since its first publication in 1971, this book continues to inform and inspire all those who believe that political engagement is the key to maintaining America's democratic tradition.

Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909 and educated first in the streets of that city and then in its university. Graduate work at the University of Chicago in criminology introduced him to the Al Capone gang, and later to Joliet State Prison, where he studied prison life. He founded what is known today as the Alinsky ideology and Alinsky concepts of mass organization for power. His work in organizing the poor to fight for their rights as citizens has been internationally recognized. In the late 1930s he organized the Back of the Yards area in Chicago (the neighborhood made famous in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle). Subsequently, through the Industrial Areas Foundation which he began in 1940, Mr. Alinsky and his staff helped to organize communities not only in Chicago but throughout the country. He later turned his attentions to the middle class, creating a training institute for organizers. He died in 1972.

• Joya, Malalai
• Simon & Schuster; 2009
• 9781439109465

• Mandy Moore & Leanne Prain (eds.)
• Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009
• Paperback, 231 pages
• ISBN: 9781551522555

On city street corners, around telephone posts, through barbed wire fences, and over abandoned cars, a quiet revolution is brewing. “Knit graffiti” is an international guerrilla movement that started underground and is now embraced by crochet and knitting artists of all ages, nationalities, and genders. Its practitioners create stunning works of art out of yarn, then “donate” them to public spaces as part of a covert plan for world yarn domination.

• Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
• Harper Perennial; 2005
• Paperback; 368 pages
• 9780006394914

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

With the popularity of Michael Moore, Adbusters magazine and Naomi Klein’s No Logo, it’s hard to ignore the growing tide of resistance to our corporatecontrolled world. But do these vocal opponents of the status quo offer us a real political alternative?

In this lively blend of pop culture, history and philosophical analysis, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue that this countercultural opposition to "the system" has not only been unproductive but has helped to create the very consumer society that radicals oppose. This thought-provoking book will enrage and entertain today’s countercultural rebels and their opponents on the political right.

• Marilyn Waring
• University of Toronto Press; May 2009
• Paperback; 172 pages
• ISBN: 978-0802093752

Marilyn Waring is a truly absorbing figure known as a distinguished public intellectual, a leading feminist thinker, environmentalist, social justice activist, and for her early political career after election to New Zealand?s parliament at age twenty-three. Assembling some of her most thought-provoking writings, 1 Way 2 C the World is a compelling collection of essays and reflections on many important issues of our time. Written in lively, crisp, and often humourous prose, Waring provides illuminating commentary on topics such as gay marriage, human rights, globalization, the environment, and international relations and development.

Including accounts of being in India at the time of Indira Gandhi?s assassination, and in Ethiopia?s during the 1984 famine, Waring?s vivid writing remains contemporarily relevant, while this collection includes recent writings on the post-9/11 world. Brimming with pieces that are essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of the world, 1 Way 2 C the World is bound to fascinate and inspire.

Marilyn Waring is a professor in the Institute of Public Policy at the Auckland University of Technology

• Judy Rebick
• Penguin Books; 2009
• Paperback; 256 pages
• 9780143169468

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (2-4 weeks).

In Transforming Power, veteran activist Judy Rebick champions new ways of achieving political goals by emphasizing co-operation and consensus over confrontation and partisanship. Rebick argues that today's combination of environmental crisis, globalization, and rapid technological innovation is producing profound new ideas about social and political life, and that this groundswell is truly the vanguard of a global movement to change the way we live our lives, from the ground up.

• Mia Kirshner, J.B. MacKinnon, Paul Shoebridge, Michael Simons
• Pantheon; October 2008
• Hardcover; 320 Pages
• 9780375424786

I Live Here is a visually stunning narrative — told through journals, stories, images, and graphic novellas — in which the lives of refugees and displaced people become at once personal and global. Bearing witness to stories that are too often overlooked, it is a raw and intimate journey to crises in four corners of the world: war in Chechnya, ethnic cleansing in Burma, globalization in Mexico, and AIDS in Malawi.

The voices we encounter are those of displaced women and children, in their own words or in stories told in text and images by noted writers and artists. The stories unfold in an avalanche: An orphan goes to jail for stealing leftovers. A teenage girl falls in love in a city of disappeared women. A child soldier escapes his army only to be saved by the people he was taught to kill.

Mia Kirshner’s journals guide us through a unique paper documentary brought vividly to life in collaboration with J.B. MacKinnon, Paul Shoebridge, and Michael Simons, with featured works by Joe Sacco, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Phoebe Gloeckner, Chris Abani, Karen Connelly, Kamel Khelif, and many others.
 

• James Orbinski
• Random House; April 2008
• Hardcover; 448 pages
• 978-0-385-66069-3

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

• Paul Hawken
• Penguin Books; April 2008
• Paperback; 352 pages
• 9780143113652

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

Paul Hawken has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and centuries of hidden history. A culmination of Hawken’s many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire all who despair of the world’s fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself.

• Shelley Jackson & Ethan Clark
• Microcosm Publishing; 2008
• Paperback; 256 pages
• 978-0-9770557-3-9

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

Here’s a hand-illustrated and accesible introduction to the world of bike repair! Through working at both Plan B Bike Project and French Quarter Bicycles in New Orleans, our co-authors have gathered a wealth of experience to share with would-be mechanics. The first half of this book is a complete repair manual to get you started on choosing, fixing, and riding your bike. The second half reprints all four issues of Chainbreaker zine, whose originals were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina.

• John Lee Anderson
• Grove Press; April 1998
• Paperback; 832 pages
• 978-0-8021-1600-0

This book is not yet released, but is available for pre-order.

Acclaimed around the world and a national best-seller, this is the definitive work on Che Guervara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution. Jon Lee Anderson’s biography traces Che’s extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the halls of power in Castro’s government to his failed campaign in the Congo and assassination in the Bolivian jungle.

Anderson has had unprecedented access to the personal archives maintained by Guevara’s widow and carefully guarded Cuban government documents. He has conducted extensive interviews with Che’s comrades—some of whom speak here for the first time—and with the CIA men and Bolivian officers who hunted him down. Anderson broke the story of where Guevara’s body was buried, which led to the exhumation and state burial of the bones. Many of the details of Che’s life have long been cloaked in secrecy and intrigue. Meticulously researched and full of exclusive information, Che Guevara illuminates as never before this mythic figure who embodied the high-water mark of revolutionary communism as a force in history.

• Ernesto 'Che' Guevara
• Ocean Books; 2004
• Paperback; 174 pages
• 978-1-920888-10-7

A New York Times bestseller, this is the book of the popular movie “The Motorcycle Diaries,” directed by Walter Salles and starring Gael García Bernal as the young Che Guevara—or Ernesto, as he was at the time.

These lively and highly entertaining travel diaries are illustrated with photos from the original journey and mark the starting point of the young Argentine medical student’s transformation into one of the 20th century’s most enduring revolutionary icons.

Che’s daughter Aleida writes in her preface to this book:

“When I read these notes for the first time, I was quite young myself and I immediately identified with this man who narrated his adventures in such a spontaneous manner… There were moments when I literally took over [Alberto] Granado’s place on the motorbike and clung to my dad’s back, journeying with him over the mountains and around the lakes… To tell you the truth, the more I read, the more I was in love with the boy my father had been…”

Published in association with the Che Guevara Studies Center, Havana.