Movies: Black Fiction, Black History
What a great couple of months it’s been for movies about the African-American experience. The African-American Film Critics Association calls 2016 …
Author Archives: Will Kirkland
Learning — a Poem by William Stafford
Learning A piccolo played, then a drum. Feet began to come – a part of the music. Here comes a …
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 …
The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Somehow, in all my years of reading, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, 1952, never entered my great river of books, even having …
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 …
Suicide by Ballot
It’s not just that Trump won but what can be seen in the vast cavern lit by that vote. For …
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 …