The only Tracy Kidder I’ve read was the one that made him famous, The Soul of a New Machine, and that was 28 years ago! But a glowing review in the August 30 issue of the New York Times Book Reviewby Ron Suskind will have me looking out for Kidder’s latest, Strength in What Remains, [...]
Also posted in Genocide, Nonfiction |
Welcome news from Grist, here’s a sample: Very big news out of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this morning: The agency has determined that all 79 mountaintop-removal mining permits submitted to it for review by the Army Corps of Engineers would violate the Clean Water Act. After eight long years of rubber-stamp permits being issued [...]
Also posted in Coal's End |
In the Loop is a glorious satire on the British decision to join America in invading Iraq. Director Armando Iannucci’ssavage take is that the big step was nothing more than the outcome of ferocious jockeying between politicians and bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The film’s standout performance is by Peter Capaldi, playing [...]
Also posted in Film, Vietnam Redux |
Fearless Russian journalist Anna Politskovskaya was murdered just outside her apartment in October 2006 (we see footage of the hooded killer), one of a number of Putin era critics and investigators (she sneaked into Chechnya a number of times to pursue damning stories) to have been killed. I knew quite a bit about her before [...]
Also posted in Film, Genocide |
T. Corraghessan Boyle is one of my favourite authors, an exuberant stylist who tackles ambitious topics, often from intriguing angles. Being a beginning student of the arcane (but surrounding) subject of architecture, I snapped up his latest, The Women, for it’s a brave fictional look at the life of an architectural great, Frank Lloyd Wright. [...]
I dreaded seeing The Hurt Locker, a movie about an American bomb disposal squad in post-invasion Iraq, simply because the subject of Iraq stirs up in me tremendous anger and guilt. And my dread is mostly justified. This is a dark, dark film, offering little in the way of redemption. Following a month in the [...]
Also posted in Film, Vietnam Redux |
It takes a brave writer to tackle the Vietnam War and its legacy. Denis Johnson, a renowned, fierce, literary novelist, has done just that, fully head on, with his 2007 epic, Tree of Smoke. It revs into action in 1963, the day JFK is assassinated, and parses the years until 1970, with a longish coda [...]
In Matisse the Master, biographer Hilary Spurling writes that Matisse’s friend Henri Cross was one of the few – possibly the only person apart from Amélie Matisse [Matisse's wife] – who fully understood the state of barely suppressed panic that underlay Matisse’s own unremitting experimentation. How exciting to read about artistic courage, to find confirmation [...]
Yesterday, Salon reported that the latest opinion polls show American public support for staying in Afghanistan has fallen below 50% for the first time in two years. At last, maybe, at last.
Also posted in Vietnam Redux |
How fascinating. Civil disobedience against coal plants is on the rise, according to Mark Engler’s superb Salon article ‘ How to kill a coal plant.’ The article focuses on the 2007 action of the Kingsnorth Six (which, according to Engler, contributed to the UK decision to shift away from coal) but then suggests mass marches [...]
Also posted in Coal's End |