Where is Tunisia? That’s what I read in many people’s eyes before I came here. I would have the same look about most of Canada, the Baltic, Russia, the Horn of Africa, and many other places. But there is a difference with Tunisia. As Americans, we should know the shores of North Africa. It is here that we forged ourselves as a new nation and then as the world’s greatest military power. Barrack Hussein Obama pointed out in his June [...]

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I nearly made a grave mistake. Ken Kesey was taking his time, and I didn’t want to wade through crap to find the pony. Life is too short for bad books, and I almost stopped reading Somtimes A Great Notion. Kesey can weave many threads together, but he is a crazy bastard, and like all madmen, hard to know. At the beginning of Sometimes A Great Notion, the dance of Kesey’s puzzle pieces is unrecognizable, like a foreign language, but [...]

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Democratization. Fourteen Roman characters that imply leaping from the ashes of disparity into equality. From servitude to ownership. Evolution, in our shared vernacular, towards a system proved by the success of the West. The formula for this perfect synthesis of rule is downloadable. Often, it employs mega-loans tied to adjustments of local policy. The world has seen the formula’s effects in the rubble of Yugoslavia, debt-ridden sub-Saharan Africa, Marshall’s Plan, and the emerging powers in southern America and Asia. In [...]

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Reflection, the act of remembering and judging the past to inform the present, is human nature. With gray hair and wrinkles, we scrutinize our lives to gauge their worth. Or to make sense of our time. Childhood, trauma, love, and trial – they all go under the microscope in the search. We all ask the big “Why?’, often through smaller questions. Was it fate that held her close? What was I supposed to say? Could I have helped them? Where [...]

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More violent than expected, The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles cuts across the mind and conscience, spilling unrecognizable blood. The telling hurts, but where? It’s a “classic work of psychological terror” set in “the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert” reads the back of the paper 1977 edition. Expect no heroes, curious reader, or an exploration into North Africa: it is just the arid canvas. This book is about Death, painted with a desolate pallete of greed, lust, [...]

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“Perhaps tomorrow man will be able to influence the climate and the rain, he will utilize solar heat industrially, by ways impossible to foresee he will modify the present situation of the desert… But today, to those who have seen the Sahara, and even those who have loved it, it is impossible to pretend that it has a value in itself.” - a forecast in 1910 by the Saharian specialist E. F. Gautier, from The Conquest of the Sahara, page 9. [...]

Categories: Book Reviews