This is not a suggestion. It is a command: Stop fighting, you world leaders and the media that enable them, stop killing and starving innocents and most mostly-innocents alike, because I/we can’t take it anymore. Any more of this, and we risk complete self-annihilation. And who is the “I” or “we” issuing this command, you…
Here it goes, the Top Ten plus a few songs of the Master (that mind-blowing genius called Bob Dylan) that have most moved me, or that I can sing along with, or that make me laugh. Because it’s so hard to choose only ten, I may add a few more, as part of a shortlist…
In 2010, after a bad experiences with a “regular” publisher, I was seduced by the promise of total freedom and instant publication on Amazon (and a handful of its competitors), possibly allowing me to write and publish much, much more. Much has changed since those early days. While Jeff Bezos’s net worth has shot up…
March 30, 2020: One score and zero years ago, my father’s World War 2 prisoner-of-war memoir, Eaten by the Japanese,** had its official national launch at the India International Centre, New Delhi (along with the launch of the U.S. edition, which was the same paperback product, except for having U.S. ISBNs on the copyright page…
No matter what you and I think of the rest of Boris Johnson, whose personality embraces bits of both the diabolic Joker (Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger playing him) and “akratic” (his description, in his only novel, of a character much like him), his United Nations General Assembly speech made history (of sorts), and the…
This is a thought that has occurred to me, on and off, right from the time Salman Rushdie issued an apology for The Satanic Verses. And it returns, as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologizes for his various instances of blackface–though books are a very different kettle of fish from crude actions such as blackfacing….
I am surprised to realize the number of Harry Belafonte songs I heard as a child: “Day-O”, “Island in the Sun,” “Jamaica Farewell,” (which I can still remember and sing) and “Mama Look a Boo Boo” (which I only knew two lines of). I may forget, almost instantly, the name of a person I’ve just…
Barry Fruchter, an English professor at Nassau Community College in Long Island, reviewed the first, rather rough edition of Eaten by the Japanese: The Memoir of an Unknown Indian Prisoner of War in 1998, and though I have quoted paragraphs from it before, the complete review itself deserves nothing less than full publication and reading,…
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