This week’s installment of Karl Wolff’s essay series, On Being Human, examines the feminist science fiction novel “Swastika Night”, an alternate history predating Orwell’s “1984” that explores the darker regions of human behavior in a far future Europe ruled by medieval Nazi knights. Continue reading CCLaP Fridays: On Being Human: Swastika Night (1937) by Katharine Burdekin
“To them, you’re just a freak, like me! They need you right now, but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out, like a leper! You see, their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.” – The Joker, The Dark Knight (2008) Taking its title from a passage in Macbeth, Shadows Walking takes the reader into … Continue reading Shadows Walking, by Douglas R. Skopp
What I’m Reading 2012 Overview: I’m currently reading five books. Each poses certain challenges (in some cases, self-imposed challenges) to me as a reader, reviewer, critic, historian, and aesthete. While New Year’s Resolutions get broken seconds after they’re uttered, these challenges will form an informal backbone to my reading schedule. As it stands, I want to increase the frequency of my blog posts from bimonthly to weekly. (The same goes for my other blog, Coffee is for Closers.) The positive responses from readers has really inspired me to do more. As you’ll see with these challenges, I want to “raise … Continue reading What I’m Reading 2012 and Other Business
“There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.” – Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary, September 26, 2001. During a cold December day, William L. Shirer, foreign correspondent for CBS, hurries to Berlin’s Tempelhof airport. He wants to catch a plane to take him out of Germany and on to Spain, from Spain eventually to New York City and the safety and security of the United States. Steve Wick’s The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the … Continue reading The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by Steve Wick
Nazi Germany. Hitler. The SS. The names bring up connotations ranging from the cinema of Steven Spielberg and Mel Brooks to tasteless political posters at town hall meetings and anti-war protests. In the eternal words of stand-up comic Bill Hicks: “We’re going in for God and country and democracy and here’s a fetus and he’s a Hitler.” In our modern age, we have called whatever enemy of convenience a Hitler. The same phenomenon throughout history with different groups of people thinking the Antichrist was Nero, the Pope, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, FDR, Ronald Wilson Reagan, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton, … Continue reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: a history of Nazi Germany (Thirtieth Anniversary Edition) by William Shirer
The Driftless Area Review 