The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization
Edited by Eddie Yuen, George Katiaficas and Daniel Burton Rose – Soft Skull Press
The Battle of Seattle is a collection of articles, written by a myriad of authors concerning the WTO protests in 1999. However, these pieces are not devoted exclusively to Seattle and the WTO. The articles cover the recent presidential conventions, thoughts about globalization and capitalism, police brutality against protesters, NGOs and their roles, protests in others places worldwide and much more. The majority of the articles are relatively short, meaning that one can read one or two in a sitting if they do not have the attention span nor time to plunge into large amounts of this book all at once.
The book looks at the protests in Seattle and other protests worldwide under the auspices of leftist ideals. However, even with the leftist viewpoint, within it there are a wide array of opinions towards capitalism and globalization and how best to approach and confront it. This diversity of opinions on the subject makes the book interesting and keeps your attention, good thing because this book is over three hundred pages and anything too one-sided could leave the reader frustrated and uninterested. The Battle of Seattle is only one of the numerous books on the Seattle protests recently making it to the shelves, but like many of these books, it will surely help generate new followers to the anti-capitalist movement and with that, hopefully some new ideas as well.