Clik here to view.
Generals and their Strategies: Patton and Napoleon on the Koran
Today, on my new Tumblr (samirchopra.tumblr.com) I posted two quotes on the Koran (or the Quran, take your pick). The first, by George S. Patton: Just finished reading the Koran—a good book and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Murakami on Japan’s ‘Years of Trial’
Like most ‘Western’ students of the world wars, my reading has largely been confined to American and English sources; this is revelatory of both provincialism and laziness on my part. In the case of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Satadru Sen on Eagles Over Bangladesh
Satadru Sen has written a very thoughtful and engaged review of Eagles over Bangladesh: The Indian Air Force in the 1971 Liberation War. His generally positive review also strikes some critical notes...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beverly Gage Misses the Mark on Ken Burns’‘The War’
Ken Burns‘ The War–a seven-episode, fourteen-hour documentary on the Second World War, released in 2007–was never going to find favor with all who viewed it. Mostly because it is unabashedly...
View ArticleClik here to view.
War is Hell – I: The Battlefield as Open Toilet
The smell of the battlefield is, quite often, a recurrent theme in the ‘war is hell‘ school of military writing. As the dead decay, slowly putrefying in the open, their remain are worked on by maggots...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ and Post-Apocalyptic Literature
There comes a moment, as the reader moves through Part Two of Ian McEwan‘s Atonement, of sensing something familiar and recognizable, a deja-vu of sorts, in the sparse yet rich, brutal, unsparing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah': The Holocaust Brought To The Present
One of the most distinctive features of Claude Lanzmann‘s Shoah is that it features no archival footage. Not a single second of it. There are no grainy, black-and-white flickering images of Jews being...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kōbō Abe’s ‘Woman in The Dunes’ And The Scientist’s Existentialist Despair
Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes wears and displays its existentialist, absurdist aspirations openly and transparently; this is its terse Wikipedia summation: In 1955, Jumpei Niki, a schoolteacher...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Shlomo Breznitz On ‘The Mystery Of Courage’
In First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy Rosetta Loy cites Shlomo Breznitz‘s Memory Fields: The fascination of hiding doesn’t amount to much compared to the mystery of courage, especially courage...
View ArticleHMS Ulysses And The Trolley Problem
I’m a professor of philosophy, and quite frequently, I teach classes on social and political philosophy and philosophy of law; the subject matters of these classes and their attendant discussions, very...
View Article
