Book Review: The World Broke In Two

The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature
by Bill Goldstein
Henry Holt, 2017

“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts” – so Willa Cather wrote in 1936, and college undergraduates have been worrying it like a soup-bone ever since. That worrying writ large forms the kernel of Bill Goldstein’s new book The World Broke In Two, with its leave-nothing-to-the-imagination subtitle, “Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature,” which centers on some of the key figures in the Western literary world in the year 1922. Goldstein, the founding editor of the New York Times books website, recounts the professional and personal lives of his main characters and a big cast of others in chummy detail (“Hearing of Virginia’s latest relapse in May, Tom wrote in sympathy to Leonard …”), all set against a backdrop of the WWI aftermath that Goldstein contends is psychologically crucial. . .

Published in Open Letters Weekly, August 20, 2017

Book Review: Bush and Cheney by David Ray Griffin

Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World
by David Ray Griffin
Olive Branch Press, 2017

Fifteen years ago, when the 9-11 “Truther” movement was in the full flush of its strength, David Ray Griffin was its most creditable and least likely mouthpiece. Griffin displayed none of the visual clues that came standard with most of his other conspiracy “researchers” – no thousand-yard stare of the perennially ignored, no permanent sheen of cold forehead-sweat, no foghorn-monotone honed over decades or entire lifetimes of speaking nonsense to power, and most noticeable of all, none of that furtive feel of opportunism that differentiates the con man from true believer.

Published in Open Letters Weekly August 23, 2017

Book Review: The Riviera at War by George G. Kundahl

The Riviera at War: World War II on the Côte D'Azur
by George G. Kundahl
IB Tauris, 2017

Even the title of George Kundahl's impressive new book, The Riviera at War, sounds fundamentally odd to modern ears; the gorgeous, sybaritic glories of southeastern France almost always strike their visitors as inviolable parts of the place, like the sea and the sunlight – the very idea that war could mar such a place seems untenable.

Published in Open Letters Weekly, August 22, 2017

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
by Laura Spinney
Public Affairs, 2017

Science journalist Laura Spinney's new book Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World details what she refers to as “the greatest massacre of the twentieth century”: [2] the wave of influenza commonly dubbed “Spanish flu” that swept across the entire planet in 1918, infecting one-third of Earth's population at the time, 500 million people, and killing somewhere in the range of 100 million of the infected before it began to abate in 1920.

Published in The National, July 25th, 2017