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Current books:
  • Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid

    Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid by Nicholas Schou


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Book Review: Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen

There’s a saying a number of people my age share: “If you remember the ’70s, it means you didn’t live through them.” British journalist and author Francis Wheen, though, has me thinking that maybe that lack of memory was not chemically induced but, rather, the result of trying to forget.

With Strange Days Indeed: The [...]

Book Review: Seth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman by David A. Wolff

By their nature, historic figures tend to be locked on particular periods in their lives. If they also happen to become a key character on television or in film, it is fairly certain they will be forever stereotyped by that portrayal. For many, Seth Bullock has become the handsome, somewhat idealistic and good-hearted [...]

Favorite Film Friday: Reds

Love stories don’t rank well on my list of preferred movies. When you get right down to it, though, one of my favorite movies — Reds — is just that, a love story, albeit one played out on an epic background. It’s the background that gets me.

Written, produced and directed by its star, [...]

R.I.P. Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

Activist and historian Howard Zinn, best known for his A People’s History of the United States, has died at age 87.

As leftist activists go, Zinn may have generated as much hatred as Noam Chomsky. Yet his People’s History is an essential and important work. Zinn looks at the history of the U.S. from [...]

Book Review: The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino

Jigoku. The Japanese word for hell. Yet probably no concept of hell is sufficient to convey the paroxysm of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. Perhaps equally difficult to imagine is being within a few blocks or or a couple miles of Ground Zero and surviving to [...]

The year in books — by the numbers

The numbers will finish off the end of the year book-related posts. I’ve been keeping a book diary since the beginning of 1976. This year I reached a record number of books read, 111. That figure is tempered by the reverse of what affected last year’s numbers. Just as my 2008 [...]

Book Review: Sashenka by Simon Montefiore

Most professional historians who write books tend to write nonfiction works in their particular field of study. Simon Sebag Montefiore has not only done that with his studies in Russian history, his biographies of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin were both award-winning bestsellers. Montefiore has since decided to apply his knowledge to the world [...]

Favorite Film Friday: Good Bye Lenin!

It’s been too long since the last installment in this series and the celebrations this week over the fall of the Berlin Wall create a perfect opportunity to talk about Good Bye, Lenin!. While the movie is about the fall of the wall and Communism, it presents an innovative and fun take on it.

The [...]

What happened to that peace dividend?

With the Cold War being waged for more than half my life, I was among the many millions fascinated with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty years ago today, the East German government — intentionally or not — opened up its borders. For most, it is also perhaps the most substantive symbol [...]

Book Review: In Search of My Homeland by Er Tai Gao

Given our history, Americans tend to think of political prisoners as those who actively oppose the political policies or government of their country. Yet in totalitarian societies even aesthetics are political so whether a person is a dissident is in the eye of the beholder. That’s what artist Er Tai Gao learned when [...]