Christopher Hitchens
The Craggy, Gruff Guy
The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two
By Studs Terkel
Hamish Hamilton 624pp £12.95 order from our bookshop
Radicalism in America may be in retreat, but populism is never quite out of style. There is always some percentage in a celebration of the working stiff, the honest guy, the salt of the earth. At the moment, there is a raft of books about the qualities of the ‘grunt’ – the GI Joe who bore the heat and burden of the day in Vietnam. Every one of these books seems to have been made into a film.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3