The Doomsday Machine: Daniel Ellsberg — This is Not Fiction
So, you like scary stories? Something to keep you awake and afraid? Here’s one for you: not thieves in the …
Author Archives: Will Kirkland
The Damned Days of August: 6th and 9th
Today is August 6, 73 years after the first use of a nuclear explosion in a war in human …
The Sea and Poison — Shūsaku Endō, confronting War Crimes
Pride in our ancestors, and countrymen is common in stories we tell each other, of their hard work, sacrifice …
All The Kings Men: Old Templates for New Demagogues
After recent study and due consideration I can say with certainty that to call President Trump the reincarnation of …
J.D.Salinger – War Troubled
Combing through the archives for my proposed magnum hopus, “What We Talk About When We Talk About War,” I came …
Barefoot Gen, a Japanese Graphic Novel in Ten Volumes: Hiroshima
THE RECENT SURGE OF INTEREST in graphic novels, with roots in the Underground Comix of the 1960s has not …
Jonathan Swift to the U.S. Attorney General
JONATHAN SWIFT, the great Irish satirist, wrote “A Modest Proposal” in 1729, in response to the British government and men of …
Heinrich Boll: German Miniaturist of War
Heinrich Böll (1917 – 1985) is not a name that non-German readers will associate with other 20th century German …
Black Rain, Two Movies — Hiroshima After the Bomb
The enormous, instantaneous destructive power of atomic weapons is the first, and sometimes the only, image that comes to mind …
The Crazy Iris — Japanese Writers and the Atom Bomb
Not much is more startling to read than a paragraph beginning “At about noon on the day Hiroshima was bombed …
Wild Wild Country: Believing it All
Anyone who has ever lived in, or been drawn to, Oregon, its coastal villages, conifer forests, big cities or high-desert …
Herman Melville — Who are the Real Savages?
For those of you who are decades away from reading Herman Melville or find that what you remember of him …