book reviews

Echoes of Lost Conversations: A Review of ‘Bright College Years’

For a novel that is smart and fun, Bright College Years, is also depressing. It reminds us of a lost world, of what the campus experience once was but is no longer. . It’s also timely: if recent events (optimistically) portend that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the self-mockery age of […]

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Revisiting Dresden—Frederick Taylor’s Eye-Opening Account and Its Contemporary Implications

There is a longstanding myth from the Second World War that the Allies killed hundreds of thousands of civilians by the sudden and shameless aerial bombing of Dresden, a beautiful city remarkable for its history and culture. That the bombing was a shameful war crime against innocent civilian German non-combatants was told by Kurt Vonnegut […]

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Review of The Last Consolation Vanished

Over fifty years ago I took a course on the Holocaust, one of the very first of its kind in the country. Being a year-long and only one of three courses that one took per semester, it was highly intensive. The first semester dealt with the history and cultures of the peoples involved—namely, Germans and […]

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Academia and the Big, Bad Fascist

In Review: Jeffrey M. Bale and Tamir Bar-On’s Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried “Wolf!” may have been originally addressed to children, but of course, adults are the ones who are in most desperate need of its lesson. This […]

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