A review of WRITING FOR JUSTICE: Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations, by Elèna Mortara. Lebanon NH: Dartmouth College Press. University Press of New England, 2015. The title of this book and especially its subtitle attest to the ambition and historic sweep of the subjects and . . .
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The debut novel from Croatian-American writer Sara Nović, Girl at War, has received significant praise from both readers and critics in influential publications such as the Guardian and the New York Times. According to such reviews, the book succeeds in representing distant experience as universal; it enables readers to empathize deeply with the main character and . . .
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A Review of Najwa Barakat, Oh, Salaam! Trans. Luke Leafgren. Interlink, 2015. Once upon a time, Beirut was a famously cosmopolitan capital, its cafes and clubs overflowing with culture in multiple languages. Riven and demolished by decades of sectarian conflict, civil war, and the predations of its neighbors, the city and its country, . . .
Read MoreOn The Stanford Prison Experiment (Part Two) (Back to Part One) A cooper, traditionally, made barrels. Also casks, buckets, tubs, butter churns, hogsheads, firkins, tierces, rundlets, puncheons, pipes, tuns, butts, pins, and breakers. Yet cooperage doesn’t end there. As the psychologist himself understands it, the central thesis of the 1971 Zimbardo study is precisely . . .
Read MoreOn The Stanford Prison Experiment (Part One) The trailer for the film dramatization of The Stanford Prison Experiment concludes with words from the actor Billy Crudup, who plays the psychologist Philip Zimbardo. We first see Zimbardo hang down his head, then the film’s title appears, and then there is a shot of a desk in a . . .
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The frontispiece of Visions and Jewels, an autobiography published by Henry Holt in 1926, is a photograph of a bust of the author, Moysheh Oyved (1885-1958), created by his friend Jacob Epstein, the great twentieth-century sculptor. Oyved, unlike Epstein, has been almost completely forgotten, but his story and his works deserve to be lifted . . .
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Last June my wife and I spent a few days in Hony, a quaint Belgian town by the Ourthe River. A very good friend of mine recently moved there, and, knowing that we were at Maria’s mother in Bonn, he invited us to visit him. The trip from Bonn to Hony, which . . .
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Because my father was a career Marine, I lived on military bases in Southern California, where during the war years between 1967 until sometime in 1970, I watched troops of new recruits assemble for embarkation to Vietnam. They were mustered at the LTA (‘Lighter-Than-Air’) Station in Tustin, CA, on which were two . . .
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Christian Appy’s new book, American Reckoning, is a brilliant and readable synthesis of all previous thinking about the Vietnam War plus deep insights into the inner workings of the powers behind the war, especially what the American people were not privy to at the time. The war had gone sour for LBJ and key members . . .
Read MoreIt is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that experimental writing is emotionally arid, its brainy explorations of language and its commitment to difficulty wringing from the work any possibility of deep feeling as a reader works through the text. The wrongness of this assumption is obvious to anyone who has spent a . . .
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