The Comedy of Charleroi – Courage and Cowardice in WW I
“The captain … was due to retire in October. In the very first burst of fire he was swept out …
Category Archives: Books
The Golden Era — A Writing Woman in Occupied China
Ann Hui, the prolific Hong Kong director, not well known in the United States, adds a serious biopic of Chinese …
The Monstrous Enterprise — Céline on the War
The first one-fifth of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, [1934, Ralph Manheim translation, 1983] is from …
A Classic from Poland – “The Doll” by Boleslaw Prus
The most unusual book in my reading universe this year has to be the 1890 Polish classic, The Doll (“Lalka”) …
It All Matters
We got one of the best seasonal cards, ever, this week. Simple black text on a fir-green card. It all …
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War
From my daily reading of the news coming from Washington D.C. and around the world I had thought it would …
Bird Life — The Thing With Feathers
It’s not all war, all the time on this blog. I do take breaks. Last month it was for a …
Blood and Oil: The Middle East in World War One
History written in text books is one thing, (hi)stories re-told from father to son, down the line of tribes and …
Lawrence In Arabia — the Southern Reaches of WW I
As World War I came to its bloody close in the fall of 1918 the British public had to be …
How Wars Begin
Among his many popular, controversial and and voluminous texts on European history, British historian A. J. P. Taylor produced one …
Fear: A Memoir from The French Trenches, WW I
Fear: A Novel of World War I by Gabriel Chevallier, 1930 is such a powerful indictment of war that in …
WW I: The Call of the Soil – Blood and Glory from France
Many of the novels written about World War I, by those who fought in it, didn’t appear until a decade …