Posts

Racism colors views, fuels controversy over Trayvon Martin case

One of the tragedies of the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case – and there are many of them, believe me – is that it has revealed, once again, the seamier side of the American mindset, particularly when it comes to the concepts of justice and “mob rule.” To be sure, there are certain points about the case that everyone seems to agree on.  Trayvon Martin, a 16-year-old adolescent was shot and killed by 26-year-old volunteer community crime watchman George Zimmerman on the early evening of February 26, 2012 in a gated community in Sanford, Florida.  There was a confrontation of some sort, there was a scuffle, and Zimmerman did fire a single shot from a pistol he was licensed to carry, a shot which killed the teenager. Unfortunately for those of us who have been following the case from a long distance, the whole sad incident is still shrouded in a fog of uncertainty.  Very few people in the gated community actually saw what happened, and like many similar occurrences in which sev

Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (2003 Review, Unedited)

Gulf War book is among the best on the subject   Written: Dec 15 '03 Pros: Reads like a Tom Clancy novel. Cons: Maybe there ought to be a revised edition with comments on Gulf War II The Bottom Line: If you like well-written military history books that read like novels, this is worth reading! 13 years and two Administrations ago, the entire world watched as the first President Bush marshaled a global coalition to confront Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and gave him an ultimatum: leave Kuwait by Jan. 15, 1991, or we'll force you out. Three months had passed since Iraq had invaded its tiny but rich neighbor, claiming the Kuwaitis were slant-drilling into Iraqi oil fields just across the border. In reality, as Rick Atkinson points out in Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, Saddam was strong-arming his way out of repaying loans made to Iraq by Kuwait and other moderate Arab countries during his disastrous war with Iran. He may have also been angered by OPEC's l

The Wild Blue: A Book Review

Image
When most people think of the American strategic bombing offensive against Germany during World War II, usually they see in their imagination the graceful lines of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force. Hollywood epics such as Twelve O'Clock High, Command Decision and Memphis Belle reinforce our collective memory of the Flying Forts taking off from Britain on their perilous daylight raids over Hitler's Third Reich, risking life and limb and machine to destroy Germany's industrial capacity and help hasten the end of the war.  While the B-17 did, indeed, contribute to the Allied victory in Europe, its dominant role as the U.S. Army Air Force's strategic bomber was a creation of public relations and the media's attention on the "sexy" Flying Fortress. The true workhorse of the daylight bombing campaign over Germany was the ungainly Consolidated B-24, aptly given the name Liberator.  As the late Stephen E. Ambrose wrote in The Wild

Another Sneak Peek at Save Me the Aisle Seat II: The Hurt Locker Review

The Hurt Locker (2009) There is, apparently, a simple rule-of-thumb (at least for those folks who keep track of these things) that war movies, no matter how well-made they may be, simply do not attract huge audiences to theaters in times of war. Certainly, people who are old enough to remember World War II and its immediate aftermath can make a good case that this is not always the case and that many of them, whether they were adults or kids at the time, watched movies such as  Air Force, Back to Bataan, Guadalcanal Diary, Sahara, The Flying Tigers  and  A Walk in the Sun , not to mention the various newsreels and government-produced propaganda films. That having been said, movies about America's post-World War II conflicts made while the bullets were flying and the soldiers, sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and Air Force personnel were in harm's way often flopped or were less-than-critically acclaimed.  (John Wayne's  The Green Berets  may be liked by fans of the Duk

Movie Review: 'Summer of '42'

Image
Summer of ’42 (1971) Part One: An Overview of Summer of '42 Nothing from that first day I saw her, and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightening and as confusing. For no person I've ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important, and less significant. In everyone's life, I often think, there is a  Summer of '42  (or '52, or '62, and so on....), a time in which we discover the joys and sorrows of growing up...and falling in love. There are hijinks and pranks, jokes and playful insults...and always the bonds of friendship. But sometimes, in those days of discovery and self-awareness, we feel the angst of that first attraction, the bittersweet highs and lows of falling seriously in love for the first time – sometimes with the right person, sometimes not. And of course, we feel the heartbreak of losing that cherished love...wondering what on Earth happened. Based on an actual event i

United 93: A Review

Image
When Universal Pictures rolled out writer-director Paul Greengrass’  United 93  in 2006, I was not sure if I would ever see it.  I certainly didn’t see it in theaters that year, and I did not rush to order it from Amazon when it was available on DVD a few months later.  Like millions of my fellow Americans, I was apprehensive about seeing a recreation of the events of September 11, 2001, and specifically about the efforts of 40 passengers and crewmembers to wrest back control of the hijacked airliner from four Al Qaeda terrorists before it hits its intended target in Washington, DC.  While I did not – and still do not – think my own reluctance came from the movie being released only five years after the events of 9-11, I didn’t want to have nightmares about United 93 the way I did back in the fall of 2001.  I was watching  Good Morning America  on that day (having tuned in a few minutes after the first plane hit the Twin Towers) and I still feel a pit in my stomach when I rem

Smetana: Ma Vlast and The Bartered Bride

The Bottom Line  Although Smetana's life ended in tragedy, his music became the foundation of Czech musical tradition. This European album highlights his best works.   Bedrich Smetana, along with Antonin Dvorak, is a composer who helped put what's now known as the Czech Republic on the classical music map; before the world heard his comic opera  The Bartered Bride  in 1866, this small Slavic country (part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire) was considered to be a musical backwater. Like Peter Tschaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia and Richard Wagner in Germany, Smetana's music was, first and foremost, a reflection of his fierce nationalism; his use of such traditional Czech dances as the  polca, furiant,  and  dumka  in his works give his compositions a distinctive regional flavor. This earned him the reputation of being the founder of Czech musical tradition, and his most nationalistic piece, the tone cycle known as  Ma Vlast (My Fatherland ) is one of the best