Henry Disney was born in 1938 and was separated from his parents for part of the War; while his future wife had to be dug from the remains of her home following a bombing raid. After the War he was partly brought up in the Sudan, he served on active service in Cyprus during his National service in 1958, and he carried out research on parasites, their hosts and insect vectors in Belize and Cameroon, as well as taking part in a 3-month entomological expedition to Indonesia. His experience has convinced him that it is folly for the West to intervene in conflicts in the Moslem world, not the least because it leads to a surge of recruitment to the most extreme Jihad movements. His experience has also served to reinforce his Christian commitment to the rejection of war as a means of solving political conflicts. Since 1984 he has been a senior researcher at the University of Cambridge. He has been author or co-author of more than 600 scientific publications, with his co-authors being from more than 50 countries across the world. He has previously published nine collections of poetry. This tenth collection is unashamedly more political than these previous nine. Book reviews online: PublishedBestsellers website.

Born the year World War I began, acclaimed poet William Stafford (1914-1993) spent World War II in a camp for conscientious objectors. Throughout a century of conflict he remained convinced that wars simply don't work. In his writings, Stafford showed it is possible--and crucial--to think independently when fanatics act, and to speak for reconciliation when nations take sides. He believed it was a failure of imagination to only see two options: to fight or to run away. This book gathers the evidence of a lifetime's commitment to nonviolence, including an account of Stafford's near-hanging at the hands of American patriots. In excerpts from his daily journal from 1951-1991, Stafford uses questions, alternative views of history, lyric invitations, and direct assessments of our political habits to suggest another way than war. Many of these statements are published here for the first time, together with a generous selection of Stafford's pacifist poems and interviews from elusive sources. Stafford provides an alternative approach to a nation's military habit, our current administration's aggressive instincts, and our legacy of armed ventures in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and beyond.

Documents of war by Choi's father fuel her second collection of poetry, a passionate and personal defiance of nationalism.

"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Led by poet Sam Hamill, February 12, 2003 became a day of Poetry Against the War conducted as a reading at the White House gates in addition to over 160 public readings in many different countries and almost all of the 50 states. Since then, over 9,000 poets have joined this grassroots peace movement by submitting poems and statements to www.poetsagainstthewar.org, registering their opposition to the Bush administration's headlong plunge toward war in Iraq. Poets Against the War features a selection of the best poems that were submitted to the website. Contributors include: Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly, Marilyn Hacker, Grace Schulman, Shirley Kaufman, Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Hayden Carruth, Jane Hirshfield, Tess Gallagher, Sandra Cisneros, former Poet Laureate Rita Dove, and many others.