Archive for the ‘History’ Category
-
Gustav Flaubert on Love and Revolution
10 Oct 2019Gustav Flaubert, known in the entire literate world as the author of Madame Bovary and not much beyond that,…
-
The Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
17 Jul 2019I know you won’t believe me that families of human beings arrived on tiny Easter Island before any such…
-
The War: A Memoir – Marguerite Duras
01 May 2019Marguerite Donnadieu was seventeen years old when she moved to France from a small village near Saigon, Vietnam, where…
-
Resistance and Subversion in Literature and Movies
20 Nov 2018We like our stories of resistance to great evil to include bold cunning, great daring and a good complement…
-
Stalingrad, a Novel – Theodore Plievier
27 Sep 2018War
-
The Doomsday Machine: Daniel Ellsberg — This is Not Fiction
08 Aug 2018So, you like scary stories? Something to keep you awake and afraid? Here’s one for you: not thieves in the…
-
The Damned Days of August: 6th and 9th
06 Aug 2018Today is August 6, 73 years after the first use of a nuclear explosion in a war in human…
-
Black Rain, Two Movies — Hiroshima After the Bomb
23 May 2018The enormous, instantaneous destructive power of atomic weapons is the first, and sometimes the only, image that comes to mind…
-
The Kaiser’s Coolies — German Sailors in WWI
13 Apr 2018Though All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929, made Erich Maria Remarque far and away the…
-
Stephen Pinker – Getting Better all the Time?
14 Mar 2018Stephen Pinker, Harvard savant and current leader in the Candide impersonator contest, was up to his usual tricks at the…
-
American Empire: Going Across the Waters
23 Feb 2018Those of us who have spent anytime at all in Hawaii, usually on vacation, enjoying the fine weather, the…
-
The Battle Cry of Freedom — The Beginnings of the Civil War
18 Jan 2018In these years when many have worried aloud about a neo-civil war brewing between American shores it is somewhat…