Today’s Topic: In semi-praise of Down by the River. Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: As we have ruled earlier, there are few good books. Down by the River by Charles Bowden, a meandering and disorganized collection of facts, soundbites and…
Posted on: January 21st, 2009 | Comments (17)
Maureen Dowd: queen of snark? The burning issue in David Denby’s new book, Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation, is that these days we’re all too snarky, and it’s imperiling Western Civilization. First, of course, he…
Posted on: January 16th, 2009 | Comments (17)
Reviewed: “A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity” by Bill O’ Reilly (Broadway, 2008). In this slight, self-indulgent memoir, Bill O’Reilly tells us how he got so “bold” and “fresh.” A humble man, he attributes his success to his own innate…
Posted on: December 31st, 2008 | Comments (11)
The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia By Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi Yea, the Lord has heard thine prayers, and He, in His infinite Sadism, has answered thee: back on sale, newly printed up, is the…
Posted on: November 23rd, 2008 | Comments (1)
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya One of the great mysteries of the twentieth century was the way Britain got away with pillaging nearly every country on the planet without suffering any retribution. I’ve spent a…
Posted on: September 8th, 2006 | Comments (5)
“My Friend Leonard” James Frey Riverhead Hardcover 2005 $24.95 See it on Amazon.com… James Frey is a liar. A bad one. And hugely successful. You can discover just how bad a liar he is by reading his second novel, My…
Posted on: September 9th, 2005 | Comments (1)
“Mao: the Unknown Story” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday Random House 2005 See it on Amazon.com… When I watched the second Addams Family movie, I knew there’d be a “blockbuster biography” of Mao coming soon. The key scene comes…
Posted on: July 1st, 2005 | Comments (1)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
There’ve been a few interesting assassinations recently. Not around here, unfortunately. Definitely not the one in Tucson. The dork empties a huge magazine into a crowd, kills nine people including a little girl, and doesn’t even kill the congresswoman he…
Want to see how we lose men in Afghanistan? Are you sure? Well, if you really want to, you can, thanks to this clip from French TV (scroll down to view it ). I warn you though, it’s pretty nasty stuff.
While we wait for Egypt to finish cooking, there’s some great footage to watch. It may not be warfare as practiced by Lee and Grant, but it’s weirdly close to what urban combat must have been like before firearms. If…
“You know, win or lose, I gotta say I love my day job”: The Pashtun positive work ethic I’ve been watching the news out of Afg—I like it spelled that way, “Afg”; kinda gets the spirit of the thing. The…
This article was first published by AlterNet. If you didn’t know better, you’d get all excited reading about the Army’s new shoulder-fired cannon, the XM-25. It’s being hyped as a “game-changing” weapon that will literally blow the Taliban out of…
Guess I should start this off with Korea, the North hammering that Southern island and the South responding like a big sister dealing with her autistic little brother: “Ow, I wonder what made him hit me in the face that…
I know, I know, I’ve been AWOL a long time. Shoot me. No, seriously. I wouldn’t object. It’d be great to get shot, as long as it was quick and fatal, not somewhere like the shin, where you scream like…
