The Twenty-Three Days of the City of Alba
World traveling, wine loving tourists might be forgiven for not associating the famed, vine-covered hills of Piemonte, Italy, with savage, civil …
Category Archives: Books
Johnny The Partisan — Fighting in the Hills of Asti and Alba, Italy
The French resistance to the Nazis in WW II was much celebrated after the war. Whatever their actual resistance and …
Ashes Tossed to Wind
There will come the day when the ashes tossed to wind are mine. Pick a day of heavy breeze, I would …
Touring Italy In Books
Learning a new language, past the age of ten at least, is something like doing a major, complicated leggo construction, …
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
It’s hard to know what words to use to praise a book like Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. It’s not a …
The Tartar Steppe: An Italian Novel about Wishing for War
A man joins the army and dreams of glory. He is sent to a distant northern frontier post watching for any …
Organizing the Little Guy against the Big: From the Great Depression to Yes We Can
“Hopelessly heterogeneous… Honeycombed with diverse and racial sub-elements…. Thus read the Federal Housing Authority report on the Boyle Heights neighborhood in Los …
Boy in the Bush: Coming of Age in New Zealand
Somehow or other last week had us viewing two coming of age movies of young boys. One, Theeb (see below) taking …
The Face of War– Martha Gellhorn, Seven Wars
Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998,) wrote much and lived more. As Bill Buford, the fiction editor at “The New Yorker” …
The Starched Blue Skies of Spain – a Remembrance by Josephine Herbst
The Starched Blue Skies Of Spain by Josephine Herbst is a small, mostly overlooked gem of reportage/memoir from the Civil …
The Face of War –Martha Gellhorn, her life
Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998,) referred to by some as one of the world’s great war correspondents did not write …
“Not So Quiet…” — A Woman Writes of War
War writing is almost by definition writing by men about men. It also, almost universally, centers on the climactic moments, the …