clock … watching time, the only true currency

At the same time I found a volume of three lectures by Wallace Stegner, I picked up American Places. Originally published in 1981, this collection from Wallace Stegner and his son Page Stegner was re-released in 2006. I enjoyed these essays several weeks ago. Father and son share an ethos that quietly, insistently urges a [...]

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The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam might also have been subtitled “the forgotten war.” Vietnam dominates modern political and military history in this country. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan elicit comparisons to Vietnam time and again. But Korea provided an earlier example of what happens when political and military [...]

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Waltz with Bashir made for an eye-opening Tuesday night. One man’s animated (literally) attempt to reconstruct his role in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Waltz with Bashir uses comic book techniques to tell a tale of young men at a war and a massacre perpetrated during that invasion. What little I know of the [...]

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After this summer’s revelation, I picked up another Alan Furst novel, Kingdom of Shadows. The story almost matches the cover for noir. Paris again serves as the hub, but most of the action takes place in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. Nice page-turner in dangerous pre-World War II Europe, where the inevitability of war made fatalism [...]

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The pursuit of victory: the life and achievement of Horatio Nelson pursues a personage whose fictional counterparts have entertained me for years. After multiple readings of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels, and a pleasant perusal of the entire Aubrey-Maturin series, I could not miss the opportunity to learn the facts behind the legend. Roger Knight [...]

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Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire was an airport pickup. As you might expect, this historical fiction re-telling the tale of the battle of Thermopylae got a boost from the successful movie 300. This book didn’t improve upon the movie, but history needs personality to stay alive, and this “first person” account keeps the basics straight [...]

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