Unworthy Republic
History, as taught to children, throughout the world, is primarily a means of instilling national pride. What if, instead, its …
Category Archives: History
Life and Fate – Vasily Grossman
If Vasily Grossman‘s great novel, Life and Fate (1980) lacks many millions of readers to catch Tolstoy’s War and Peace …
The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science
The Romantic period of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly in England and of others around Europe is not normally thought of …
The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge
One winter afternoon Comrade Tulayev, an important Party official, is shot dead. By the time The Case of Comrade …
Gustav Flaubert on Love and Revolution
Gustav Flaubert, known in the entire literate world as the author of Madame Bovary and not much beyond that, …
The Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
I know you won’t believe me that families of human beings arrived on tiny Easter Island before any such …
The War: A Memoir – Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu was seventeen years old when she moved to France from a small village near Saigon, Vietnam, where …
Resistance and Subversion in Literature and Movies
We like our stories of resistance to great evil to include bold cunning, great daring and a good complement …
Stalingrad, a Novel – Theodore Plievier
War
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 …
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 …
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 …