FRESNO, CA – It’s summer, you’ve got a little more time off, so you can read up on war instead of trying to live in whatever boring suburb you live in. Lawns, neighbors, dogs, kids—it all sucks and the best thing you can do is get as far out of it as you can. A lot of war fans do it by logging into the game world, where we’re all seven feet tall and bulletproof.
But I’m old school. I still actually read those book things, about actual wars where people die and stay dead, magic amulets just get you killed, and elf princesses are few and far between. The only way to stay on top of this game is to keep inhaling a lot of info, so after a while you get a taste for B.S. That means you have to study up. You know when the Bible says, “They shall study war no more”? Well, I’m not one of the they’s they were talking about. Here are some of the war books I’ve been chowing down on lately. Hopefully they’ll help you get through your hot dull summer too:
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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 long, bitter time brooding over this experimental proof that there’s no such thing as karma. But karma takes hard work. As Caroline Elkins’s bravely revealas, covering up the slaughter of some 300,000 ethnic Kikuyu of Kenya, the torture of hundreds of thousands more, and the internment of the entire Kikuyu population, in mid-20th-century Kenya could be hidden by doing one simple thing: burning all the evidence. (more…)
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 long, bitter time brooding over this experimental proof that there’s no such thing as karma. Among the reasons I’ve found for this failure to prosecute are the reluctance of the raped to report their sufferings, the stupidity and credulity of American scholars vis-a-vis their Oxbridge colleagues, and the charmed life that seems to reward those individuals and nations lucky enough to lack any vestige of conscience. (more…)
