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California Literary Review

Archive for the ‘Military’ Category

A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn by James Donovan

by Ed Voves

September 25th, 2008

Had Sitting Bull and his war chiefs reacted in the customary skirmishing style of Plains Indian warfare, the outcome would have been very different. But the Sioux and Cheyennes, fighting with their backs to the wall against the encroaching tide of white civilization, opted for a pitched battle and almost from the outset, Custer’s tactical plan went terribly wrong.

Bracing For Armageddon? by William R. Clark

by John R. Guthrie

August 14th, 2008

Asahara amassed hundreds of million dollars and sent agents to far-flung destinations to ferret out information and materials for use in bioweapons. In 1995, he sought to hasten the apocalypse and seize earthly power by spreading an unlikely sacrament, sarin gas, in the Tokyo subway system. This event killed twelve people outright and injured another thousand or more, many of them seriously. The group had carried out a previous gassing, a sort of practice run for the Tokyo event, in the outlying town of Matsumoto. Seven died.

A Boy’s View of a World War

by Peter Bridges

July 15th, 2008

The three Libby’s men were the first American businessmen to receive Allied permits to travel to the Continent. They spent most of the summer there. My father kept a journal that was full of business data but also recorded tragic scenes, including the crowds of people walking down Dutch roads, coming back from forced labor in Germany, and the almost total desolation in Hamburg, where Allied bombing raids had killed perhaps fifty thousand people and a million others fled the city.

Eugene Debs and the Fight for Free Speech

by Paul Comstock

June 26th, 2008

Debs was the great voice of socialism in the United States for the first two decades of the 20th century, a five-time presidential candidate for a third-party crusade against capitalism. He was a homegrown rebel, born and raised in Indiana, and a powerful speaker who knew how to translate socialism into an American idiom.

Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II by Sarah Byrn Rickman

by Elinor Teele

May 27th, 2008

They were also a PR dream. Initially working for her future husband, Robert Love, the young and pretty Nancy Harkness was hired to demonstrate and sell airplanes. Predicted to replace the family car, the private plane was seen as the wave of the future. If women could fly it, the perception was, anybody could. What Love thought of all of this malarkey, the cheesecake photographs and press coverage, is hard to determine.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

by John Holt

March 7th, 2008

Often written in a quiet, understated style that belies the madness and violence that seep through every aspect of life in this jungle country more than forty years ago, Tree of Smoke subtly hammers the reader with an unceasing rage that is the true nature of war’s insanity.

Notes From Italy: Villains, Romance, and Views

by Peter Bridges

February 7th, 2008

Filettino was not always a happy place, in history or in fiction. In the time of the Caesars the people here were Aequi, an Italic tribe of rough herders whom the Romans subdued with difficulty. For many centuries, probably millennia, the Aequi practiced transhumance, leading their herds over the Serra in late autumn to spend the winter in pastures in the Liri valley far below, and returning to the uplands for summer.

Battle for Falluja: Photos from Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by Ashley Gilbertson

January 28th, 2008

The captured fighter claimed to be a student who had gotten stuck in Falluja. A Marine responded, “Yeah, right, University of Jihad, motherfucker.”

The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson

by Peter Bridges

November 14th, 2007

This long, well documented book by Rick Atkinson is one of the best accounts of any war to appear in the last decade or more.

Images from How To Photograph an Atomic Bomb

by Peter Kuran

October 22nd, 2007

Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted over 300 atmospheric nuclear tests above the ground, in the ocean or in outer space.

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