Omar – Love and Betrayal in an Occupied Land
Let’s do a thought experiment about a movie. In it, an occupying army has a stranglehold on the local populace. …
Category Archives: Art & Culture
The Garment Jungle — Old School Union Organizing
The International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the ILGWU, has a fabled name in labor and progressive circles, once one of …
The Missing Picture – Oscar Nominee from Cambodia
Update: Too bad, The Missing Picture, a powerful, engaging film about the Cambodian genocide did not win Best Foreign Film …
Mexican Mystery Classic: The Mongolian Conspiracy
New Directions, blessed with a nose for lesser known and marginalized literature of high value since its founding in 1936, …
Chico — War in Croatia, and the World
Though war movies and novels are overwhelmingly about large nation-state wars occasionally one breaks through about the smaller scale national …
Blue Valentine — Don’t Open this
I got off my regular movie beat of war, its causes, outcomes and human behavior this past weekend and landed …
Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Great Wave of Progress
Just finished listening to a very able Audible reading of The Bully Pulpit, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s paean to Theodore Roosevelt, …
Hidden Battles: War Trauma Across Cultures
Hidden Battles is an accomplished documentary bringing us 5 war participants-as-fighters and the years that have followed them: Israeli soldier, …
Post War Trauma — and Love
Terry Gross interviewed a quite incredible couple today on her Fresh Air show. Kayla Williams and Brian McGough met in …
The Things They Carried – Writing About War
The last American troops left Vietnam over 40 years ago but the war goes on. Tens of thousands of veterans …
Her — A Good Evening Squandered
Count me as among those who found Her, the new movie by Spike Jonze, very very borrrrring. By an hour …
Three Soldiers — A WW I Novel of John Dos Passos
It’s hard, reading today, to get a grip on the impact which John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers had on the …