The dust storm came blasting down Wall Street. Luckily I saw it coming and managed to duck inside before it engulfed our building, blocking out the sun. For several minutes, crouching nervously in the darkened lobby, I tried not to think about what the dust really was. Tried not to think about the people I [...]
Tag Archives | war
“An Artist of the Floating World” by Kazuo Ishiguro
An elderly, celebrated artist, Masuji Ono, is living in retirement in Japan just after the end of World War Two. His daughter is having trouble in her marriage negotiations for reasons he can’t understand: gradually he realises it’s because he is associated with the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, a period now discredited [...]
“A Pale View of Hills” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Most of this novel is memory: a woman thinking about her daughter’s suicide and remembering an earlier summer in post-War Nagasaki. Almost nothing happens in the present day. The whole story takes place in the past. And the story in the past is full of holes. At first this annoyed me but, the more I [...]
Johann Hari – How we fuel Africa’s bloodiest war
The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a “tribal conflict” in “the Heart [...]
“Afterwards” by Rachel Seiffert
The style of writing is very conversational. No beauty, not even many full sentences. The sort of writing with not many verbs. Just reportage,and not always very grammatical, like you were hearing someone tell you it on the phone. That part didn’t work for me, but the advantage of it was that it focused my [...]
The crime of compassion
Sometimes I think I have become so cynical that I am no longer capable of feeling true outrage. I have come to expect fascism, brutality and heartlessness from my elected leaders as a matter of course. But every now and then, something comes along that makes my jaw hit the floor once again. Today was [...]
How about a little humanity?
Does this sound familiar? A war in the Middle East launched for obscure reasons. The justification changing constantly according to what ministers think can “sell” it to the people at any particular time. Disregarding the United Nations. Bombing people in order to protect them. Being surprised when such brutality does not win the hearts and [...]
Getting better all the time…
I suppose now the Red Cross can be added to the list of dangerous subversives who deride the war in Iraq for their own crazy left-wing reasons. After all, they have released a report cataloguing the sheer horror of life in Iraq under American occupation. The Red Cross, as always, is careful not to apportion [...]
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