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 …
Category Archives: Books
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 …
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 …
The Kaiser’s Coolies — German Sailors in WWI
Though All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929, made Erich Maria Remarque far and away the …
Stephen Pinker – Getting Better all the Time?
Stephen Pinker, Harvard savant and current leader in the Candide impersonator contest, was up to his usual tricks at the …
War. Courage. Resistance.
“If in any country whatever a recruiting campaign were to be launched today for some utterly preposterous war, a war …
American Empire: Going Across the Waters
Those of us who have spent anytime at all in Hawaii, usually on vacation, enjoying the fine weather, the …
Yes, There Were Anti-War Officers, Too
I was co-author of a recent opinion piece in the NY Times on-going Vietnam ’67 series. It begins like this: …
The Battle Cry of Freedom — The Beginnings of the Civil War
In these years when many have worried aloud about a neo-civil war brewing between American shores it is somewhat …
War Porn – Roy Scranton’s Unremitting Gaze
War Porn (2016) by Roy Scranton is not a book to be easily read. To be read, yes, but …