Here’s a reprint of a post I published on another site in 2011. It’s aimed at my writer friends, but readers should appreciate it as well. When I ordered David Jauss’ “On Writing Fiction” (Writers Digest Books, 2011) I wasn’t confident I’d find much worthwhile. I have a basic distrust of how-to books. The last […]
One of Socialism’s Biggest Failures: Israel
Unless you’re an Israel scholar, you may not know that most of the founders of the modern state of Israel were secular Jews and socialists. The system they put in place in 1948 was based on socialist principles, reflecting both the experience many had growing up on kibbutzim or activism in socialist organizations in Europe. […]
Hope: The Underlying Message of Ben Winter’s Underground Airlines
Ben Winters wrote Underground Airlines (Mullholland Books, 2016) ostensibly to bring attention to the lingering pernicious affects of slavery in America, but his inventive story can also be read to show far we have come from the days when slavery was legal. In Underground Airlines, an escaped slave––whose true name we never learn––has been coerced […]
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen: A Review
Forty plus years after the U.S. abandoned Vietnam to the Communists, Viet Thanh Nguyen captures the duplicity of all sides during the Vietnam war and its aftermath in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer. Reading Nguyen reinforces my belief that I was on the right side in the 1960s when I joined the anti-war […]
My Report from the 2017 AWP Writers Conference
I attend my first Association of Writers & Writers Programs (AWP) Conference in D.C. for two days this past week. It was eye-opening, not only in terms of the information I gleaned from the five workshops I attended, but based on my observations of the scheduled workshops, the exhibitors, and the people. Despite the projected […]