Short Fuse
iIf we lift the fog hovering over the War in Vietnam what we find a story nearly unknown in the West: far from devising and launching the Tet Offensive, Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap consistently and adamantly opposed it.
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.
The Attack is a movie that tries to get to the core of violence without dissolving into its depiction.
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.
I am a secular Jew who can’t but welcome Zealot‘s conclusion that Christianity pulled a role reversal on Jesus, and made this failed revolutionary Jew into someone who eschewed his people and its traditions in favor of Roman power.
The eccentric and charming “Computer Chess” focuses on a group of geeks concentrating on what they see as the infinite microcosm to be found on the sixty four squares of the chess board.
“Hannah Arendt” is a substantial and worthwhile portrait of the influential and controversial thinker who gave us the phrase “the banality of evil.”
Author Christian Caryl ends “Strange Rebels” with the idea that “if the experiences of 1979 suggest one conclusion, it is that we should never underestimate the powers of reaction.”
New York suffers what might be the effects of innumerable 9/11s.
Fuse News: Paleo-Atheism, Susan Jacoby, sexting. . .
New media always abets the power to articulate fantasy and fetish.
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