At some point while reading Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield, I started to read faster, flipping pages, and almost skimming. It must have been shortly after I realized that Ashley–the title character, but by no means the only female soldier documented in Gayle Tzemach […]
Book Review | Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia
April 21, 2014 by
Over the years, I’ve run into Camille Paglia’s essays at unexpected times, and I seem to always come away thoughtful and, occasionally, amused. Clearly coming from a perspective distant from my own, politically and culturally a member of East Coast academia, I never the less found her insights and way of putting things provocative. When […]
Review | Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff
May 16, 2013 by
There was a moment when reading Mitchell Zuckoff‘s latest book, Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II, that I crossed over from a mildly interested reader to a rabid page turner. I’m pretty sure it was in the first chapter, if not the […]
Featuring author Mitchell Zuckoff, master of the WWII rescue narrative
April 30, 2013 by
Two of the best and most interesting books I’ve read in the last year–Lost in Shangri-La and Frozen in Time –are both tales of harrowing and dangerous rescues set during World War II. Both involve the rescue of survivors of crashed airplanes–from the one of the last unexplored jungles of the world and the other from […]
Review | The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
April 5, 2013 by
In the author’s note to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee notes that “Cancer is not one disease, but many diseases.” It anticipates Mukherjee’s history, a look at cancer starting in the ages and proceeding forward to the modern-day. It’s a 4,000 year history, and Mukherjee tells it well. The tale, […]
Review | HHhH by Laurent Binet
February 7, 2013 by
HHhH may be one of the most intriguing novels I have read in recent memory. Translated from French, its title is based on a German sentence: “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich”, or “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”. It is the story of the 1942 attack in Prague on Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most dangerous men in […]
Review | Lost in Shangri-la by Mitchell Zuckoff
January 21, 2013 by
In the closing months of World War II, twenty-four serviceman and WACs climbed aboard a military transport plane for a day of sightseeing over a recently discovered “hidden valley” deep in the interior of Dutch New Guinea. Surrounded by high, jungle covered mountains and far from civilization, the valley was home to natives undiscovered by […]
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