The Lone Caner

Ray Bradbury is a twisted Isaac Asimov, a literary Dali who painted with his words, a Stephen King before Stephen King was there. If King is the master of the occult, of horror, and of long novels and deep characterizations playing “what if?” with the universe, then one of the wellsprings of his imagination was surely the taut, tightly wound dystopian short stories penned by his prolific predecessor.  And indeed, how much of our subterranean mental landscape has been formed by this one man, a contemporary of the early 20th century dime novels and pulp fictions with which I am [Click here for the full review…]

It’s a curiosity of Watership Down that everyone who has ever read it (at least, those I have met) seems to believe it is a discovery all his or her own. People get this look in their eye when the book comes up: it’s like they are welcoming you into a secret brotherhood or something.  There are a few books like that: they’ve dropped out of sight and memory, but their adherents revere them and reread them, constantly. Watership Down was published in the UK 1972 and has much faded from public view, I think, though Stephen King has mentioned [Click here for the full review…]

Wilfred Thesiger, who died in 2003, was the last of the old land explorers, whose likes included Burton, Speke, Younghusband, Lawrence, Connolly, Hedin, Amundsen, and stretched as far back as Marco Polo. Fluent in Arabic and French Thesiger was the first European to cross and extensively map the dreaded Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, and wrote acclaimed travelogues of now-vanished times in the middle east, and the Marsh Arabs of Iraq.  An unashamed Arabist, he loved the great empty silences of the desert, and the nomadic culture of the Bedu; he much preferred to travel and live the way they [Click here for the full review…]

The other day I was having a spirited discussion with a friend of mine in Toronto.  He cautiously started a sentence: “The fall of Constantinople in the 16th century…” “1453.” I said He gave me a doubtful look.  It’s not one of those facts you expect a half drunk guest to have at his fingertips, and I kinda feel for him there. It was sort of unexpected. “Are you sure?” “1453, April to May, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the 2nd laid siege to the city, then took it by storm. It marked the end of the Byzantine empire and the flood of émigrés [Click here for the full review…]

I don’t know of anyone from my generation who did not at least hear of Doom.  This one game – first released in 1993 – was the single most eagerly awaited offering of any software company to that time, was a landmark event that crashed the servers of the hosting BBS one minute after the midnight “opening”, and was reputedly the second most common reason quoted for the loss of productivity in offices worldwide (solitaire being the first). As a working pro who corrupted every team of auditors for three years into playing deathmatch games after hours in our darkened offices, I [Click here for the full review…]

  What an enormous, sprawling, wide-ranging, dense, tragic, magisterial narrative has Robert Fisk spun out of his journalistic experiences. I have read Edward Said’s works on the Middle East, Huntigndon’s “Clash of Civilizations,” and passed through many histories of that troubled part of the world, but it is my considered opinion that this outcome of thirty years’ reporting there is in a class by itself. Personal, compelling, well-researched and passionately written, it is on a par with “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” for unbridled emotional and intellectual impact. Fisk’s writing is a tour of the modern history of the [Click here for the full review…]