"Acclaimed historian Patton (The Pattons) focuses on the war correspondent persona and the band of bold adventurers who earned their keep on the frontlines in this detailed salute. A first correspondent whose actions provided the template for all who followed, The Times of London's William H. Russell, respected battle, an appreciation that found him in the thick of the bloodiest clashes including the Battle of Bull Run, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian war, and the Russo-Turkish war. In a no-frills, straightforward narrative, Patton describes the backgrounds of the early pioneers, John Russell Young, George Smalley, Holt White, and Henry Villard, who embraced armed conflict and its horrors, while feeding their dramatic observations to The New York Herald and The New York Tribune. The American publications dueled with each other, such as when Smalley opposed sending untried reporters into the battlefield, instead preferring two experienced correspondents dispatched to each army's headquarters. Some excitement is generated with the sections of the wild and brilliant career of American painter-war correspondent Frank Millet, who bravely covered the 1877 war in the Ottoman Empire. Patton's tribute to these battlefield scribes revives an understanding of why these men mattered." --Publishers Weekly
Patton visits today: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/patton_Robert14.html
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Hell Before Breakfast in Publishers Weekly
Monday, April 28, 2014
Robert Patton Tuesday, Grandson of General George Patton
Robert Patton, grandson of the legendary WWII General George S. Patton will present his new nonfiction book, Hell Before Breakfast: America's First War Correspondents Making History and Headlines, from the Battlefields of the Civil War to the Far Reaches of the Ottoman Empire (May 2014), tomorrow, Tuesday, April 29th.
More about the events: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/patton_Robert14.html
Booklist said: “A fascinating cast of characters…Patton details major conflagrations and social and technological changes amid the gore of war and the prose of reporters of another era.”
More about the book: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/128217/hell-before-breakfast-by-robert-h-patton#praise
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Stumbling Upon an Undiscovered Archive
"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.
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).
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
On Writing and Erasing History-- Nick Turse
Nick Turse, who visits the NYS Writers Institute tomorrow, calls out the Pentagon for its selective rewriting of Vietnam War history, and makes some dark predictions about the future of propaganda:
"It’s 2053 -- 20 years since you needed a computer, tablet, or smartphone to go online. At least, that’s true in the developed world: you know, China, India, Brazil, and even some parts of the United States. Cybernetic eye implants allow you to see everything with a digital overlay. And once facial recognition software was linked to high-speed records searches, you had the lowdown on every person standing around you. Of course, in polite society you still introduce yourself as if you don’t instantly know another person’s net worth, arrest record, and Amazooglebook search history. (Yes, the fading old-tech firms Amazon, Google, and Facebook merged in 2033.) You also get a tax break these days if you log into one of the government’s immersive propaganda portals. (Nope, “propaganda” doesn’t have negative connotations anymore.) So you choose the Iraq War 50th Anniversary Commemoration Experience and take a stroll through the virtual interactive timeline."
More on Huffington Post via TomDispatch.com: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-turse/misremembering-americas-wars_b_4808201.html
More about Turse's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/turse_nick14.html
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Nick Turse on the Fog of War
Wednesday, Feb. 19th.
In The Nation's Investigative Fund's "The Backstory" project (about the art and practice of investigative journalism), Turse talks about the challenges of collecting data on civilian casualties in war zones, and in particular the challenges of writing his feature article for the October 7, 2013 issue of The Nation, "America's Afghan Victims."
Original article here: http://www.thenation.com/article/176256/americas-afghan-victims#
Backstory interview here: http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/backstories/1908/the_backstory:_nick_turse
More about Turse's upcoming visit to Albany here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/turse_nick14.html
Photo: Troops on patrol in Afghanistan Photo: Lewis Whyld/PA Wire Read More......
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Carolyn Forche in the New Yorker
Carolyn Forche's new anthology of poems written by prisoners, slaves, victims of torture, and others testifying to conditions of political oppression, Poetry of Witness (2014), is featured in a capsule review in the New Yorker's "Books to Watch Out For." Forche visits the Institute on Thursday.
Reviewer Andrea Denhoed says, "The editors’ extensive and varied selection amounts to a reconfiguration of English literary history and a consideration of the purposes and achievements of poetry."
More in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/01/books-to-watch-out-for-january-1.html
Details of Forche's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#forche
Friday, May 4, 2012
In case you missed Harry Staley on Wednesday....
In advance praise, literature scholar Todd F. Davis said, “The portrait of the speaker in the majority of these poems is one of a man conflicted in his religious faith, in his faith in his fellow human community, in the wars that religion has persuaded his fellow humans to take part in…. Staley demonstrates an understanding that is deeply spiritual, yet does not yield to easy, forgiving answers.” Read More......
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
New Event: Poets Harry Staley & George Drew
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Remembering Marie Colvin, "The Best There Was"
Writing in New York magazine, journalist Eliza Griswold, who visited the Writers Institute in September 2011, joins with journalist Emily Troutman to eulogize journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed recently by rocket fire in the Syrian city of Homs.
"Just to start off with a few words about Marie, who was the best — not one of the best — woman in the field today. I first met her in a minefield in northern Iraq, eye patch and all. Stories about Marie's courage, almost insane courage, precede her. She had her eye shot out when reporting on the Tamil Tigers, she married the same man twice — which is very brave — she wedged herself into Gaza's tunnels."
"But she was in no way a gonzo crazy person — one of those, I hate to say it, mostly American war reporters (not women usually) who is all about themselves. She was about the people living and dying in the field, and it is in no way surprising to me that she died doing what she felt called to do. She was tough as hell, but not the empty bravado, bearing-witness-in-leather-pants type of reporter. For an entire generation of women, she was the best there was, and that there could be." More.
Monday, February 27, 2012
John Sayles: Literary Child of John Dos Passos
Maverick movie-maker John Sayles, who takes your questions tonight at the UAlbany Performing Arts Center uptown, is the author of A Moment in the Sun, newly out in paperback.
Ben Crair of The Daily Beast compares the sprawling historical novel, set during the upheavals of the late 19th century, to the work of Great American novelist John Dos Passos:
"A Moment on the Sun looks past its contemporaries on the New Releases shelf and takes a page instead from John Dos Passos, whose gigantic U.S.A. trilogy is a stylistic and spiritual forebear. The book blends invented characters—like an African-American soldier named Junior and a drifter named Hod—with historical figures, including Mark Twain and McKinley's assassin. Chapters jump between perspectives in a narrative montage—one of the few techniques that fiction writers have successfully appropriated from film. Sayles sometimes tosses in letters, newspaper headlines, and advertisements. The sum total is a sprawling, mosaic portrait of the nation. "If human beings have a way of looking at the world, nations do, too," Sayles explains.
More.
Friday, February 24, 2012
John Sayles: A Tornado of Voices
John Sayles, who visits Monday, is interviewed by Alec Michod of The Rumpus about his new historical novel, A Moment in the Sun.
The Rumpus: Your new novel, A Moment in the Sun, is written in—I wouldn’t say English, exactly, because you’ve taken and twisted the language to make it your own. It reads like a tornado of voices.
John Sayles: Every character has their own language, voices and styles. There’s a chapter from the point of view of a correspondent, and it’s written like the correspondence of that time. I read a bunch of those guys, Richard Harding Davis, and picked up on their locutions, which aren’t locutions we use anymore. More.
Picture: American writer Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916)
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
A War No One Brags About
"Saturday marks the anniversary of a war America won — but doesn't care to crow about. When the memory only produces shame and regret, you can understand why."
"Such is the fate of the Philippine-American War, otherwise known as the Philippine Insurrection, which began on Feb. 4, 1899. It's a reminder of a time when America's dreams of imperial greatness got in the way of its democratic values."
Emil Guillermo writes about the war, and about John Sayles's film Amigo in a commentary piece in Tuesday's Times Union.
Sayles visits Monday, Feb. 27th. Amigo will be screened prior to his visit, Friday, Feb. 24 in the Performing Arts Center uptown.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
The Invasion of New York
Willard Sterne Randall, who visits today, writes of Alexander Hamilton's efforts to defend Manhattan against the British navy in the January 2003 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.
"On August 8, Hamilton tore open orders from Washington: his company was to be on round-the-clock alert against an imminent invasion of Manhattan. “The movements of the enemy and intelligence by deserters give the utmost reason to believe that the great struggle in which we are contending for everything dear to us and our posterity, is near at hand,” Washington wrote.
"But early on the morning of August 27, 1776, Hamilton watched, helpless, as the British ferried 22,000 troops from Staten Island, not to Manhattan at all, but to the village of Brooklyn, on Long Island. Marching quickly inland from a British beachhead that stretched from Flatbush to Gravesend, they met little resistance. Of the 10,000 American troops on Long Island, only 2,750 were in Brooklyn, in four makeshift forts spread over four miles. At Flatbush, on the American east flank, Lord Charles Cornwallis quickly captured a mounted patrol of five young militia officers, including Hamilton’s college roommate, Robert Troup, enabling 10,000 redcoats to march stealthily behind the Americans. Cut off by an 80-yard-wide swamp, 312 Americans died in the ensuing rout; another 1,100 were wounded or captured. By rowboat, barge, sloop, skiff and canoe in a howling northeaster, a regiment of New England fishermen transported the survivors across the East River to Manhattan. More.