Harvey Blume

Book Review: Russia’s “Vodka Politics” — An Inseparable Duo

April 3, 2014
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What about today? Has Russia finally hit bottom and recovered? Is the political economy of vodka a thing of the past?

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TV Review: Simon Schama Tells His “Story of the Jews”

March 29, 2014
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Simon Schama just can’t stop going on about religion and the extra-special Jewish feel for beauty that has, to his mind, kept Judaism vibrant and intact through the ages.

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Short Fuse: Quotes for the New Year

December 31, 2013
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Fuse Writer Harvey Blume supplies some quotations for the new year.

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Short Fuse Book Review: “Dissident Gardens” — Fantasy Meets Radical Politics

September 21, 2013
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It’s hard to grasp how Jonathan Lethem assimilated all this material — historical and fantastic — and gave it new narrative life in Dissident Gardens, except by granting, to start with, his special genius for absorption.

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Fuse News: Farewell, Elmore Leonard

August 20, 2013
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Writer Elmore Leonard, passed away on Tuesday, 8/20/13, 87 years old. Age no doubt chipped away at him physically but not so far as I could tell at his style and his prose.

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Book Review: Violence, a la the Freudian and Biblical canon

July 28, 2011
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Short Fuse thinks Russell Jacoby’s “Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present” is an unconvincing mix of refurbished Freudianism and Genesis.

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World Books Update: Of ‘Denial’ and other matters

August 4, 2010
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By Bill Marx In my other life, as editor of World Books for The World, BBC/PRI’s national radio program dedicated to international news, I write and edit book reviews as well commentaries and interviews. I also host a monthly podcast dedicated to global literature, which is available through ITunes. The most recent pieces posted on…

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World Books Update

July 4, 2009
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By Bill Marx I am juggling editing and writing duties between two blogs, theartsfuse and World Books for the website of BBC/PRI’s radio program The World, which is produced at WGBH in Boston. The section aims to be a critical conversation made up of reviews, commentaries, interviews, podcasts, and news stories about international literature. Respected…

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Norman Mailer: Tough Fights

November 11, 2007
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By Bill Marx and Harvey Blume I was asked by National Public Radio’s Morning Edition to write an appreciation of the late Norman Mailer. I have posted an unabridged version of this necessarily short piece. After that, I have placed an interview Harvey Blume had with Mailer after the publication of his 1995 book Oswald’s…

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Book Review: “The Last of Her Kind” — Boomer Stories are Booming

April 24, 2006
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Well-crafted fiction about the politics and psychosis of the sixties is becoming a growing industry. The Last of Her Kind, by Sigrid Nunez (Farrar Straus and Giroux); “Eat the Document: A Novel” by Dana Spiotta (Scribner) By Harvey Blume The legacy of the sixties keeps coming at us. By now, even President Bush might have…

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