Askold Melnyczuk’s story, “Walk With Us,” in the Massachusetts Review Casualty issue, is so skillfully turned you don’t know who the subject is until the end. At the risk of being a spoiler and softening the moment of recognition, I have to say it’s about Lynndie England, the poster girl for Abu Ghraib. But . . .
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In a famous series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955, the philosopher James Langshaw Austin told us something everyone already knew: Language doesn’t just say things, it can also do things. In publication, the book based on these lectures took this point and ran with it. How to Do Things With . . .
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Motivational posters line the hallways en route to the visitation room. Images of rock climbers, an eagle soaring over clouds, a collection of hands of all pigmentation on a basketball, each with an inspirational one-word message: LEADERSHIP, OPPORTUNITY, ACHIEVEMENT, FOCUS, TEAMWORK. Opportunity? Achievement? The irony was almost outrageous. The hallway was in . . .
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The introductory chapter to Priscilla Hayner’s comparative study of truth commissions begins simply and dramatically. The author quotes an exchange with a Rwandan government officer, the sole survivor from his immediate family. One out of seventeen. The occasion for their conversation was a visit to the church at Nyarubuye, a scene of . . .
Read More“Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves”… I’ve always liked that phrase, from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Even more so because these days I regularly come across suggestions that the self itself may be nothing but story. “Nothing but” – I must insist – is a far cry from “just” or “merely.” Readers of MR, or any . . .
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