Tag
Military
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American Music, American War
In World War II, G.I.s waking up in a combat zone in Italy were reported to have belted out “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin,” a blockbuster smash of 1943.
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Make Allies, Break Empires
“Do you want to join the army, or do you want to go to jail?” This question—typically posed by a judge to a teenager charged with a petty crime—animated …
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Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an endless War on Terror. Alternatively, it can become a description of our era as yet another chapter in the history of the…
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Life After Wartime
Fisher House looks like any other suburban American home: a well-manicured lawn; a kitchen stocked with Girl Scout cookies, Maseca, and ice cream; a living room with a flat-screen TV and children’s toys; a barbeque out back. But for the wounded soldiers at Fisher House, ordinary life is painstakingly reconstructed but never really achieved. In…
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Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?
Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see at a Starbucks counter. But in 2007 Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, one of the first…
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Virtual Roundtable on the Library of Korean Literature
In this virtual roundtable, edited and introduced by Seo Hee Im, Koreanists and scholars of world literature reflect on five writers recently published in the Library of Korean Literature series by Dalkey Archive Press. • Joe Cleary on Choi In-hun, The Square • Wai Chee Dimock on Lee Ki-ho, At Least We Can Apologize •…
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The War in the Air
The staggered beginnings of Kate Atkinson’s remarkable new novel, A God in Ruins, take a lurching upward trajectory, moving from earth to sky. Its fleeting prelude offers a glimpse of a Royal Air …
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How Fascism Pushed Women out of the Frame
Italians today tend to draw a firm line between the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime that ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 to 1943 and the Italian Republic that emerged in its wake. The memory of Fascism and its cult of political violence, however, have never ceased to be timely in the Bel Paese, a…
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Far Outside and Deep Within:More Novels on World War II
Even in the paroxysm of publishing around the centennial of the First World War last year, novels about the Second World War dominated, as they usually do, historical fiction about the 20th century. In honor of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2015, I binge-read a slew of books published…
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Bellatrix and the American Revolution
Bellatrix, a star in the Orion constellation, is 240 light-years from Earth. The light emitted from Bellatrix that we currently see began its journey just prior to the American Revolution, when Paul Revere and Benjamin Franklin were flesh and blood and there was no United States. Most histories of the period do not begin with…
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Morality and the Italian Civil War: An Interview with Stanislao Pugliese
After more than 20 years, Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, recognized as a masterpiece of Italian historiography, has been translated into English. Stanislao Pugliese, professor of history at Hofstra University, edited this 700-page magnum opus and added a detailed introduction, making available for the first time to the American…
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Geoff Dyer’s American Liberation
Geoff Dyer may be the greatest complainer in contemporary literature. It’s a quality of Dyer’s writing that is often noticed but rarely celebrated, the snobbish and insecure voice on the page that’s infectious even when annoying and runs through all his best work. In a way Dyer’s writing exists in its own genre—a genre of…
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Can Drones Have Ethics?
In this interview, Claire Richard and media studies professor Peter Asaro discuss the history of drone warfare and the troubling proliferation of new technologies that can surveil and kill from a distance. While we’re plenty familiar with drones thanks to the War on Terror, Asaro details the strategic rationale behind their use, along with the…
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Pynchon’s Children
The work of Thomas Pynchon has long been synonymous with literary postmodernism, especially the version that involves manic overplotting and paranoid speculation about sinister systems whose names elude us. He has also always been understood to be broadly “countercultural” in some ’60s sense, championing the little guy against those sinister forces. While these characterizations are…
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The Hope and the Horror
In 1953, a young Jean Franco set sail from Europe for Central America. She arrived in Cuba a few days after Fidel Castro’s ill-fated assault on the Moncada Barracks. Continuing to Guatemala, she witnessed the US-backed military overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz’s reform government, a coup that placed the country on the road to genocidal oppression.…
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Security Laboratories
In recent years, feminist movements in Egypt have negotiated with gendered logics of governance oriented around the imperative to protect women from sexual harassment. Meanwhile, in Brazil, activists have rearticulated campaigns waged by a newly reformed police force intent on rescuing children from transnational sex trafficking networks. In his new book, the political scientist and…
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Sentient Instruments
Things had been tough since Dee got back from Iraq. She and her husband were sleeping on opposite sides of the bed. “I’m sorry you’re not getting laid,” she snapped at him, “but I’m still seeing my buddies get killed in my head!” One night, they sat down to watch Transformers with their three-year-old daughter. As…
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The Rise and Fall of Internationalism
On February 5, 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted to the UN Security Council that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the UN must issue an ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to disarm or face attack. UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix countered that there was no smoking gun. After weeks of…
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War Stories
Today anyone with a computer or smart phone can access videos of armed conflicts from around the world. Battles that would once have been shared days, years, or even generations after the fact, via newsreels, books, or folksongs, are now available for immediate consumption anywhere, anytime. But is anyone watching? Recent wars have proven to…
