lgerians know from war.  It’s an undeniable fact that Algeria has experienced its share of civil war and unrest, which perhaps reached a zenith at the tail end of French colonization.  The film The Battle of Algiers is one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever watched…made by Algerian filmmakers within months of the end of the war with the French, it highlights the street tactics and ingenious guerilla warfare that locals engaged in to triumph over their colonizers.  It is black and white and shot in a city still torn up from homemade bombs, buildings riddled with bullets.  So … Continue reading As promised, War, What is it Good For?

My name is Art T. Burton, I wrote the new biography, Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves. This book was a culmination of ten years of intensive research which should help to broaden readers perspective on Wild West history. I look forward to answering questions from readers of my book or thoughts on the Indian Territory, blacks in the West, or the Wild West in general. I holstered my toy guns at the age of 12 and now in my mid 50s I am back in the saddle again, with a brand new … Continue reading Black Gun, Silver Star

he recent literary salon hosted by the University of Nebraska Press on Leslie Duram’s Good Growing: Why Organic Farming Works should have been attended by anyone who eats or who at least cares about what they eat. Those who did attend the April 20 salon at the Lincoln Woman’s Club were privy to an excellent discussion that left me wondering (and worried) about how we so willingly allow our very sustenance to fall into the hands of a few conglomerates that daily stir up an unholy alchemy of chicken nuggets and cheez puffs. Salon co-host Jim Bender, a Nebraska organic … Continue reading A Word, Before You Take That Next Bite

At Home on This Moveable Earth by William Kloefkorn “Kloefkorn’s sonorous prose and poetic sensibilities heighten the reader’s perception of life . . . the book’s structure is carefully wrought; he uses counterpoint, flashbacks, shifting points of view and variations on themes to shape his memoir. Kloefkorn is a consummate storyteller with a keen eye and a gift for language that is beautiful in its simplicity.” —Publishers Weekly Annex (May) “Kloefkorn . . . reveals his life one vignette at a time in this richly evocative third installment of his proposed four-part memoir. With deftly wrought imagery so powerful and … Continue reading

I, Nadia, Wife of a Terrorist by Baya Gacemi “Gacemi’s unique and invaluable portrayal of this personal side of terrorism is shocking, poignant, and impossible to forget.”—Booklist (May 1) “This first-person account of a young woman’s seduction by Islamist extremism also offers an intimate look at the Algerian civil war. . . . Gacemi’s book received a lot of attention in France. Since Americans are less knowledgeable about Algeria, it will probably get less here-which is unfortunate, since her account of how a whole community can be seduced by terrorists is frightening and invaluable.”—Publishers Weekly (4/10/06) “Nadia tells her story … Continue reading

kay, if you define science fiction as fiction that needs science as an integral part of its plot, then this isn’t sf.  But Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones and the movie based on the book by Hayao Miyazaki both captured something for me, and they are clearly speculative, so apology ended.  For one thing, the book and the movie could almost be separate topics.  Miyazaki takes the book as starting material and then, like the best adaptation movies, instead of being falsely "true to the book", he uses it to create his own vision.  Jones’s book is quite … Continue reading Howl’s Moving Castle

Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker by Randolph Lewis “Most Americans probably do not know that Canada has an oft-distinguished film industry. . . . Here Lewis goes some way toward redressing this oversight by discussing the career of a documentary filmmaker who is a double rarity: a member of a First Nations tribe (one of the Canadian indigenous peoples) and a woman. . . . Lewis relates the story of this remarkable woman in conventional chronological order, with ample biographical data and a detailed analysis of her oeuvre and its impact on Canadian society. . . . … Continue reading

Drinking Dry Clouds by Gretel Ehrlich “These are exquisite stories. They reach to one another, as do their characters, interrelated and sharing the elegant but terrifying sense of place beneath the mountains on ranchland in western Wyoming.”—Bloomsbury Review (Mar/Apr 2006) Continue reading

icasso had his blue period.  Hugh Hefner, by his own admission, is currently in a "platinum blonde phase."  And during my college years, (when I wasn’t cruising up and down "O" street looking for trouble) I was in a China phase.  Red China Blues, Wild Swans, China Wakes, and Fox Butterfield’s lovely tome China: Alive in the Bitter Sea were my entree into a world of concubines, hard labor, gulags, emporers, tyrants, stealthy political activism, and destruction from the inside of one of the world’s most populated countries.    I would have made a terrible member of the Red Guard.  … Continue reading Take heart, little grasshopper!