"Turse opened a box — it was dusty and looked untouched — and began thumbing through reports of more than 300 allegations of massacres, murders, rapes, torture, assaults, mutilations and other atrocities committed by U.S. military personnel and substantiated by Army investigators."
Paul Grondahl describes Nick Turse's discovery of unknown Pentagon documents, and the subsequent investigations that led to his 2013 bestseller, Kill Anything That Moves, in the Times Union.
More: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/War-expose-Luck-then-total-dedication-5267572.php
Turse visited the Writers Institute last week:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NINdkI5YrS8
Picture: National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Stumbling Upon an Undiscovered Archive
Kendra Smith-Howard discusses Grapes of Wrath
Her 2013 book, Pure and Modern Milk, calls attention to the ways in which new
standards of purity and changing consumer practices reconfigured the work and material
environment of the dairy farm in the twentieth century.
STARRED
REVIEW in Publishers Weekly: “Smith-Howard succeeds as both historian and
storyteller in developing an essential narrative about American
industrialization and how both nature and technology have been romanticized.
Her coherent and complex view of the 20th century is both informative and
enjoyable.”
More about the film series: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#grapes
More about the book: http://global.oup.com/academic/product/pure-and-modern-milk-9780199899128;jsessionid=C0F0A2675F9402DD7D8FBBE506F268A5?cc=us&lang=en&#
Today is John Steinbeck's Birthday
http://www.google.com/logos/2014/steinbeck/steinbeck14.html
Tomorrow, 2/28, we will screen the film adaptation of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#grapes
Historian Kendra Smith-Howard will moderate a discussion afterward. Read More......
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Elizabeth Floyd Mair interviews E. L. Doctorow in the Times Union
Q: Some critics might say that the focus of this novel is smaller and more confined than some of your earlier works, since it doesn't feature a large cast of characters but is just the voice of one man talking about his life. Yet to me it seemed vast anyway, because of the unexpected twists that Andrew's stories take. What's your sense of whether or not the story is smaller?
A: I would say rather that this novel is not formulaic fiction — it is not a linear narrative that has at its context a recognizable social reality — the world of business, say, or of domestic life, or of war. It is large on its own terms, as is an installation, or a cubist canvas that turns everything inside out.
More: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Seeing-through-another-s-eyes-5252956.php
Doctorow comes to UAlbany tomorrow, Thursday, 2/27:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#doctorow
Fiction Without Formula-- E. L. Doctorow
Here are some recent reviews of Andrew's Brain (2014) by E. L. Doctorow, who visits us tomorrow.
More about the visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/doctorow_el14.html
Review in the Washington Post, "E.L. Doctorow moves to fiction without formula in ‘Andrew’s Brain’": http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/el-doctorow-moves-to-fiction-without-formula-in-andrews-brain/2014/01/13/a9e07e40-7c69-11e3-9556-4a4bf7bcbd84_story.html
Review in the Australian, "Mind games from EL Doctorow, a master storyteller": http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/mind-games-from-el-doctorow-a-master-storyteller/story-fn9n8gph-1226826888921
Review in th National of the United Arab Emirates: http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/the-review/el-doctorows-new-novel-has-a-portnoys-complaint-flavour#full
Monday, February 24, 2014
"A Highly Original Experiment in Historical Fiction": Doctorow's Ragtime.
In 1975, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times is awed by E. L. Doctorow's novel, Ragtime:
"It works so well that one devours it in a single sitting as if it were the most conventional of entertainments. And the reviewer is tempted to dispense with heavy breathing and analysis and settle down to mindless celebration of the pure fun of the thing.... But Ragtime works--and works so effortlessly that one hesitates to take it apart. Still, the questions persist: How does it work? Why do these historical images--half documentary-half invented--seem truer than the truth? And the answer is, for one obvious thing, they reflect all that is most significant and dramatic in America's last hundred years or so...."
More in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/08/books/doctorow-ragtime.html?_r=0
Doctorow visits Albany to present his new novel, Andrew's Brain, this coming Thursday, February 27:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/doctorow_el14.html
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Nick Turse on Bill Moyers
Nick Turse, investigative journalist who comes to UAlbany today, was interviewed two weeks ago by Bill Moyers:
http://billmoyers.com/segment/nick-turse-describes-the-real-vietnam-war/
“American culture has never fully come to grips with Vietnam,” Turse tells Bill Moyers, referring to “hidden and forbidden histories that just haven’t been fully engaged.”
Come see Nick this afternoon in the UAlbany Performing Arts Center uptown:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/turse_nick14.html
He'll be talking about his newest book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (2013).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)