A Sharpening Of The Knives, By Neil Belton
Thiscurious new novel is closely fitted to the bare bones knowledge of the actuality of the life of a world-famous mathematician and physicist, and for some years the head of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Dublin: Erwin Schrödinger. For Belton’s work is an odd literary amalgamation: deeply thought with some fine writing at times…
Read MoreReview Of Into The Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose The Myth Of A Free Press
Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press,by Kristina Borjesson, Revised and Expanded Edition, Prometheus Books, 2004 This collection of essays and articles is intriguing and irritating in almost equal measure. The inside stories of life in the news media are revealing: they show how many sectors of the American media are…
Read MoreThe Myth Of Zionism, By John Rose
John Rose’s The Myths of Zionism (2004) is a long overdue book fearlessly examining the strategic, historical and ideological roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a true tour de force. Most books on this fraught subject tend either to be inquiries into the international forces behind the conflict, devoid of historical depth, or else are reportorial…
Read MoreThe Avant-Garde Film, Revisited
Shortly before his death this year, the film theoretician, P. Adams Sitney, significantly revised one of his earliest articles on avant-garde cinema and submitted it to Logos. In its first iteration, the article provided one of the first attempts to chart the currents of avant-garde cinema at a point when the movement thriving. This revised version’s…
Read MoreThe Undead Ghost Of Operation Condor
When Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier and his U.S. colleague Ronni Moffitt were killed in a powerful car bombing on a Washington D.C. street in September 1976, few realized that the double assassination was the work of Operation Condor. Condor was a Cold War-era covert network of U.S.-backed Latin American military regimes in Argentina, Brazil,…
Read MoreNorman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On The Misuse Of Anti-semitism And The Abuse Of History
Most of the controversy surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict is, in my view, contrived. The purpose of contriving such controversy is transparently political: to deflect attention from, or distort, the actual documentary record. One can speak of, basically three sources of artificial disagreement: (1) mystification of the conflict’s roots, (2) invocation of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust…
Read MoreAnimals, Slavery, And The Holocaust
Where does all the war, racism, terrorism, violence, and cruelty that’s so endemic to human civilization come from? Why do humans exploit and massacre each other so regularly? Why is our species so violence-prone? To answer these questions we would do well to think about our exploitation and slaughter of animals and its effect on…
Read MoreThe Lost One: A Life Of Peter Lorre,by Stephen D. Youngkin
Iconic actor Peter Lorre once was described fondly as a rococo cherub gone slightly astray, but as Youngkins 613 page opus shows, this extremely talented man strayed very far indeed from his astonishingly accomplished theatrical beginnings propelled by the rise of Nazism, a World War, fickle Hollywood, and a witch hunt, to name but a…
Read MoreThe Revolutionary Spirit
Rum and revolution have been associated together for centuries. Rum is “the global spirit with its warm beating heart in the Caribbean,” the one factor that is shared by all the cultures of the region, and enthusiastically drunk by the descendants of those who were enslaved to produce it. I began drinking rum with uninformed…
Read MoreTale Of Two Cultures: A London-Barcelona Diary
It was a dream come true: I had been playing tennis since I was eleven years of age, and always told myself I had to see Wimbledon before I died. As I approached sixty, a minor miracle made this dream come true, and I unexpectedly came into possession of tickets for Centre Court for the…
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