Benn Books

In light of recent events (9/11) this book is more valuable than it has ever been in its 20 years of print. As the Bush administration declares war on terrorism (a term they refuse to define)the military industrial complex stands to develope beyond its already ridiculous proportions, and human rights stand to be squandered to the back of our national conscience. Already the U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia has claimed that any type of civil protest in Bolivia is to be considered terrorism, as such protest stands to cripple the U.S. drug war effort in said country. The war on terrorism will inevitably become the excuse to continue U.S. imperialism, and restrain civil liberties and human rights worldwide.
This book explains how many people have refused to support such violence and military action, by refusing to pay their taxes, and redistributing them to peaceful and humanitarian organizations. This book offers an in depth look at the history of war tax resistance as a form of political protest, its values and its accomplishments. It explains the reasons why someone might choose to pursue such action, and what one might expect from the government in response.
I encourage everyone to pick up this book, if not to use it, to at least be familiar with the options of political protest described within, and the reasons that drive U.S. citizens to resist war taxes.

Most Tax protesters have ended up paying high penalties or worse, in jail.
Left-wingers are buying this book like crazy to show their support for "peace". But I thought they were in favor of taxes. I guess when someone takes their money and spends it on a program they don't like, its wrong. But when someone with a different political view wants taxes to stop funding left-wing causes they call it selfishness. Real hypocrites. Pay your taxes, stay out of jail. If you're really upset, try voting sometime...

It's published by the War Resisters League.

EG's love for bicycling shows up here as we look at postcards about bikes from all over the world. Some of the pictures feature characters who appear in other EG books. I like the cover the best.

Typical Edward Gorey drawings and as always highly amusing. Gorey presents the book as a series of postcards & in the preface, says this is the first joining between bicycles and postcards.

As always, Gorey has a gift for odd combinations and for catching the humor in things. Highly recommended.

This is more in a Jonsonian vein than Shakespearean. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in Jacobian theater and culture. Because the characters are stock figures, the whole machinery of the debt and marriage systems is made transparent, provided you can see through the jokes. And speaking of jokes, I laughed out loud several times and enjoyed the parodies of some of Shakespeare's famous speeches. Sir Giles Overreach is a great villain and the naifish hero Welborne really does find a clever 'new way to pay old debts.' The introduction calls this a proto-typical debt comedy. Not having read every debt comedy, I'm willing to take Craik's word.

New Mermaids does good work in terms of modernizing spelling and providing notes for those of us who aren't PhD's. People wanting an original-spelling text should go to their university's library or take a valium. Craik's introduction is brief but effective. It should be read after the play, since the play is easy enough to follow on first read with only a few recourses to the Cast List. Enjoy!

"A New Way to Pay Old Debts" is a typical Renaissance comedy. The young hero, tellingly named Welborne, has lost his fortune thanks in part to an evil old uncle. Machinations, engagements, and quarrels follow. This is supposedly Massinger's masterpiece, but it has never been a special favorite of mine. I think that Ben Jonson and others pull off similar stories in a more amusing way.

I am a fan of the New Mermaid series. I like the commentary and introductions provided. However, the language is more modernized than it is in most editions os such literature, and if you insist on reading the original spelling, another edition is better for you.

An excellent account of debates within the Left and of Ralph Miliband's role within them. It is also a good portrait of his personality. If in a few places it is hard going, that is not the fault of Newman, but of the complexity of the issues (e.g. in Miliband's controversy with Nicos Poulantzas.)

Miliband was insistent that genuine Marxist socialism must be combined with genuine democracy, and he relentlessly tested both capitalism and Soviet-style dictatorship against this criterion. This often left him isolated on the Left, at times even among his closest friends and collaborators, and the book brings out his occasional depressions and self-questioning. Newman, though obviously an admirer of Miliband, also here and there expresses reservations about aspects of Miliband's intellectual positions and practical strategy. But if, from time to time, there are suggestions of Miliband's limitations, the final chapter is a magnificent exposition of his strengths.

This book on Ralph Miliband, one of the key figures of the New Left, gives us useful insights into why that movement failed.

Newman (like Miliband a Professor of Politics) tells us that Miliband was happy `to speak, debate and write political statements' but `found meetings and organisational work very tiresome' and found `organisation and discipline unacceptable'. Newman reveals the earth-shaking insignificance of the New Left's disputes at dinner-parties and seminars.

Not surprisingly, a New Left composed of egos like Miliband, E. P. Thompson and Tony Benn (who wrote in his 1985 Diary, "I'm always thrusting myself forward for publicity") could never work together. These `critical' intellectuals only agreed in seeing themselves as superior to the `ignorant' workers.

Newman tells us that by the mid-1960s Miliband had `come to the belief that a new Socialist Party would eventually need to be established ..." And he did as much as helping in `preparing the ground for the coming into being of a new party'! But did the New Left ever manage to found this new party?

In fact the New Left, just like the old left, adopted the tried and failed Fabian tactic of permeating the Labour party. The famed `independent Marxism' ended up as a marginal colony of social democracy.

At history's turning points, the New Left always supported the US government: it was for the CIA-backed counter-revolution in Hungary in 1956, against Vietnam's liberation of Cambodia from Pol Pot, and against the Soviet assistance to Afghanistan's only progressive government ever, which gave women equal rights and land to the peasants. At these crucial times, the New Left took the enemy's side, then moaned that the `left' was divided. It was always divorced from the working class, from the trade unions, from reality.

The New Left constantly whinged about the `left's disarray'. But what did its fragments all have in common? They rejected Leninist democratic centralism, by dishonestly caricaturing it as oppressive! In democratic centralist parties, the minority carries out the decisions of the majority, whereas the New Left always wanted minority rights, its rights, to trump the majority. Marxism without Leninism is playing without winning.

The New Left's endless projects for renewal, unification, realignment, and saving the Labour party, are all part of the confusion of thought that alone has held back the British working class for so long.

Brillant and acute, if not somewhat idiosyncratic, close-readings of U.S. literary naturalistic texts. Michaels's buoyant prose and the oblique angles he takes in historicizing the texts make for a provoking, worthwhile read. His arguments concerning the masochistic contract (revision of the more conventional deleuzean understanding) and his exploration of the question 'why does the miser save?' are among the most compelling and thrilling close-reads--rather than 'applying theory' to the texts at hand, he offers ways in which the texts themselves produce critical theory. Fabulous work.

This book, by far, goes on my list of one of the worst books I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Pseudo-clever theoretical jumps about texts that oversimplify and completely decontextualize what the texts say. For example, "The Yellow Wallpaper," commonly thought to present a woman who is confined by her husband/doctor in the attic to lead to her eventual madness. According to Michaels, the short story is not about confinement and restriction, but about over-production of hysteria that the unnamed narrator is forced to engage in because of the ideology of her society. Interesting? maybe. Insightful about the Yellow Wallpaper? Not at all. If you are into post-structural theory masturbating over itself 244 pages, please buy this book.

This book starts out as a light-hearted look at English society in the late 1920's but gets pretty heavy in the end. It reminds one of old black & white movies. The author Elizabeth McKintosh wrote under two pseudonyms, Gordon Daviot & Josephine Tey. She wrote over a dozen plays, some very successfully staged (notably "Richard of Bordeaux"). She also wrote 8 mystery novels, including the celebrated "Daughter of Time" & 3 other novels. This is one of the latter. It's an early work & seems as much a play as a novel. It's quite different in many ways from her other novels. I don't know if it resembles her plays. It's pretty enjoyable & a quick read, but the ending is sudden & a bit odd--something like the endings of her mysteries. Overall, I liked it, but the ending seems contrived and, perhaps, a bit out of character. So, I'm torn between a 3 & 4 star rating. Tey, it has been said, improved greatly over time; I agree. Her other 2 non-mysteries are "Kif" (also an early work) & "The Privateer" -- her last published work before her death (the mystery novel, "The Singing Sands" was published postumously). Though this book is somewhat dated & quaint, it does display Tey's talent for characterization, turns of phrase, etc., but I think most readers today would give it lower than 4 stars.

". . . of considerable interest for its insights into the continuing puzzle of why so many German intellectuals were taken by Nazism and whether postmodernist thought is indictable for the seduction. . . .Roche has enriched the dialogue about a dark chapter in intellectual history. As neo-Nazism continues its troubling re-emergence in America and abroad, we cannot learn too much about its intellectual roots and seductions." -- from my review in the Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 28 (1994), 345-348.

You are probably not purchasing this book unless you have read Desert Queen, the biography of Gertrude Bell. Because she was a photographer, in addition to her many other talents, I mistakenly assumed this was a photographic book. Instead, it is her fascinating first hand account of her love affair with Persia. An educated woman and a keen observer; read this book if you are looking for an in depth, personal understanding of the Middle east in the early 1900's.

This book takes the history of Sweden from earliest times to the date the book was written (1972). Skimming very lightly over the period prior to 1523 (and the rise of Gustav Vasa), the author then begins to examine Swedish history with increasing depth. Covering a broad range of subjects from politics to art and literature, the author succeeds in giving the reader a real feel for the changes (and consistencies) that run through Swedish history. The final chapters go into great depth on 1960s Sweden, providing as much information as any reader could possibly want.

One of the things I liked about this book was the author's habit of giving the birth and death dates of various people mentioned, allowing the reader to place that person within a generational context. Unfortunately, she did allow this practice to trail off about halfway through the book. Overall, though, this is a good book for those who want information on Sweden from between 1523 and 1972 (especially the latter years). The author's stress on literature was quite fascinating, and makes this book a good read.

Very naive - these guys need to work harder before publising. Some terrible naive comments - reads like a bad essay at university and perhaps even high school. waste of money... Terrible stuff a shame that anyone published this.

I must respectfully disagree with the esteemed reviewers of this book listed above. I expected so much more from a book with such a fine pedigree (Brookings and the US Council on Foreign Relations).

The topic of how states use financial instruments towards their foreign policy goals is an area which certainly requires more understanding. As such, I expected this book to be an in-depth study of the various ways states have used such tools, and how the authors expect such tools to be used in the future. I thus expected analyses of topics such as how states respond to currency crises of allies and enemies and how states use counterfeiting of enemies' currencies as foreign policy (i.e. as Iran is alleged to do with the US dollar). I also expected a study of how states manipulate access to important currencies (as when the US cut Panama off from receiving dollars as part of an effort to topple Noreiga) and how they have sought to manipulate the foreign financial press (as is alleged to have happened during the classical Gold Standard era).

Some of these topics did receive mention. The issue of how the US should respond to allies' crises received good coverage, especially regarding South Korea. There was also one paragraph acknowledging that countries have counterfeited others' currencies, and a brief discussion of petro-dollar recycling. Moreover, I found the chapter on how interest groups have attempted to restrict access to US capital markets to further other goals very illuminating, and there was a nice summary of anti-terrorism finance legislation. Overall, I found the first half of the book very enlightening.

Unfortunately, the other half of the book dealt predominantly with the authors' assertions that dollarization should be the way forward for developing countries to prevent currency crises, and in particular, that the US should encourage this and absorb some of the costs. The issues of whether countries should use floating, dirty float, pegged or dollarized exchange rates is an important one. However, I did not pick up this book to read about the authors' assertions about dollarization--I picked it up to read about financial statecraft.

Financial statecraft will only grow in importance, and as the authors note, it is critical that policymakers understand how it functions and what tools are at their disposal. This book only discusses financial statecraft primarily in its first 80 pages (and scattered in some places in the latter part of the book as well). I feel eighty pages was just too little to adequately examine financial statecraft. Instead, the reader is unfortunately left with a quick gloss-over of only a few aspects of such an important and under-analyzed topic.

Steil and Litan define economic statecraft as applying economic means to influence other actors in the international system, and financial statecraft as those aspects of economic statecraft that are directed at influencing capital flows. They cover a wide range of issues, starting from the recycling of petrodollars in the 1970s to the fight against the financing of terrorism after 9/11, with special highlights on financial sanctions against non-state actors and on the foreign policy dimension on financial crises.

Capital market sanctions, the idea of restricting access to the US capital markets in the service of foreign policy aims, are increasingly popular in some quarters, reflecting the growing importance of capital transactions over trade flows. The authors demonstrate that it is also an incredibly stupid idea: money is fungible, and the capital that is not raised in New York can be easily raised elsewhere at the same cost. Even if all major stock markets cooperated to bar access to targeted companies that operate in certain rogue states or participate in arms dealings, the small rise in the cost of capital that these firms would incur would be vastly offset by the gains accrued from these operations.
The authors raise the example of PetroChina, which Congress tried to ban from listing on the New York Stock Exchange because of its involvement in the Sudanese energy sector. The public campaign against the Chinese company assembled a motley crew of activists, ranging from organizations associated with the Christian Right to the AFL-CIO and human rights advocates. In the end, the IPO was scaled down and the campaigners claimed victory, as the AFL-CIO convinced some pension funds not to invest in the Chinese company.

Meanwhile, the share price of PetroChina quadrupled in four years, and Sudan now exports 85% of its oil to China. Interestingly, the main foreign investor in the company is the US mogul Warren Buffet, known for his investment acumen and who acquired 14% of the company through the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, where most of its shares are listed. The idea that foreign firms can raise capital only on Wall Street and that US investors wait at home for them to come is simply wrong.

This book is a reminder that "policymakers frequently apply financial statecraft with a poor understanding of how financial markets actually work, leading to policy actions which are inadequate or which exacerbate the problems they are trying to remedy."