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: History
A Very Short Introduction to Fascism
The word fascist lost its adhesion to two particular strains of political movements decades ago and became a general term …
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 …
The Populist Explosion by John Judis
The word “populism” has re-entered the American vocabulary with more force than since it first made an appearance in the …
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 …
Touring Italy In Books
Learning a new language, past the age of ten at least, is something like doing a major, complicated leggo construction, …
Organizing the Little Guy against the Big: From the Great Depression to Yes We Can
“Hopelessly heterogeneous… Honeycombed with diverse and racial sub-elements…. Thus read the Federal Housing Authority report on the Boyle Heights neighborhood in Los …
Boy in the Bush: Coming of Age in New Zealand
Somehow or other last week had us viewing two coming of age movies of young boys. One, Theeb (see below) taking …
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” …
The Starched Blue Skies of Spain – a Remembrance by Josephine Herbst
The Starched Blue Skies Of Spain by Josephine Herbst is a small, mostly overlooked gem of reportage/memoir from the Civil …