How War Began – Way Back Then
Why do we do it, so often, with such relish? Go to war, that is. Is it locked into our …
Category Archives: War
Japan’s WW II Cinema: Bucking Up the Home Front
Watching Japanese films from the 1940s and 50s is difficult for many. No big sword fights,no clothing shed in intimate love affairs. …
Goya’s Ghosts
Having carried some of the images of Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War in my mind from an early age, it …
Anatomy of Fascism
The bibliographic essay at the end of Robert O Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism is some 27 pages long. At about …
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging — by Sebastian Junger
Although the word tribe has long been used in a more-or-less neutral way for a certain type of social organization, tribalism has lately …
Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945
It is hard to visualize, walking around Modena or Cremona or Verona, Italy as I have recently, that gangs of …
Andre Malraux — Man in his Violence
Andre Malraux was the quintessential adventurer-intellectual of the between the World War years. Man’s Hope was on 1960s high school …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Theeb: A Bedouin Boy in the WWI Desert
Aimless movie wandering sometimes pays dividends. We happened into a streaming presentation of Theeb, by British-Jordanian director, Abu Nowar. Recipient of considerable …
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” …