No One Leaves Home, by Warsan Shire
Unbelievable poem by Warsan Shire. no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run …
Category Archives: Books
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919
Nothing like good history, thoroughly researched and well written, helps better to put in place pieces of the immense human puzzle …
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
A recent article in the NY Times Tuesday Science section caught my attention and brought to mind one of the …
Resisted War, Resisted Racism, Resisted Silence: George Houser
Ninety Nine years is only the last accomplishment of George Houser’s amazing life: WW II conscientious objector, 1940 Co-founder of the …
Walking the Sierras, One Millennium at a Time
As a kid, like many other kids, I was fascinated by time travel. And perplexed. If I could go back …
1913: Seeds of Conflict in Palestine
1913: Seeds of Conflict, a 2014 PBS distributed documentary by Ben Loeterman, is a fine, short introduction to the little …
The African Queen: WW I Adventureland
Needing a break from my sometimes distressing immersion in WWI memoirs and history [here, here and here] I thought I’d …
Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain’s Memoir of WW I
Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, recently brought to view by the movie of the same name, unaccountably escaped my decades long reading …
Vera Brittain: Not only the Movie, the Book
Military historian, Simon Jones, says Vera Brittain’s memoir, Testament of Youth, upon which the new movie is based, is one …
Boots to the Sun — An Italian Memoir of the “Great War”
Two indispensable companions are always with me on late-life trips across the seven continents. Leading the way is my excited-to-be-there, take-everything-in life …
Naples Liberated: Curzio Malaparte’s “The Skin”
It is hard to think of another work of fiction of such savage irony as Curzio Malaparte‘s La Pelle (1949) …
Salt of the Earth: Sabastião Salgado Looks At Worlds in Trouble and One of Healing
Sebastião Salgado’s photography is among the most stunning in the history of the camera. Many talented and fully engaged witnesses with cameras …