Month: April 2009
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Book: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam might also have been subtitled “the forgotten war.” Vietnam dominates modern political and military history in this country. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan elicit comparisons to Vietnam time and again. But Korea provided an earlier example of what happens when political and military…
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Book: The Eight
Katherine Neville wrote The Eight more than 20 years ago. Thanks to The Da Vinci Code, this form of modern-day treasure hunt for mythical historical artifacts found a new audience (its first?). Neville’s book was reprinted and can be easily found in bookstores. I picked it up on the way to Hawaii in February, and…
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Book: The American West as Living Space
In contrast to Murakami, I’ve read most of Wallace Stegner’s fiction, and embraced his non-fiction, too. So, finding a new-to-me slim 1987 volume of three lectures thrilled. The American West as Living Space at its heart explores how water — and its absence, often enough — defines the region. We’ve endured our third dry winter…
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Book: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
I haven’t read a word of the fiction that makes Haruki Murakami famous. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running logs the author’s real-world training for the New York City Marathon. The structure of the training journal doesn’t bound the words or topics, though. Subtitled “A Memoir,” the book explains the start of…