Saturday, May 07, 2011



In the center of Prague is a statue of the early 15th-century Czech church reformer Jan Hus that bears the motto: “Truth will prevail.” Thanks to Kovály’s memoir that motto, at least as it pertains to the 20th century, is being borne out.

Deb Richards has worked as a reporter, producer and executive producer on some of the most prestigious programs on Australian current affairs television, including ABC's Four Corners, Lateline and Media Watch programs as well as SBS-TV. She is a multi-award winner, and in 1999 she was joint winner of the Gold Walkley -- Australia's top award for excellence in journalism Gold Walkley The selling of journalism Cash for Comment

There is only one rule. Astonish us! Here’s a test: You now have thirty seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the 20th century. What book would you choose? Of course, half a minute doesn’t leave much room for reflection—once you’ve arrived at the end of this sentence, your time is all but up. Still, I doubt that most readers of The American Interest will have had much difficulty coming up with several classic works before the clock ran out. ;-) Jozef Imrich's Cold River :-) and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago would be prime candidates to capture the Soviet side of the horror; Victor Klemperer’s secret diaries published in two volumes as I Will Bear Witness document in deep detail the Nazi side of the totalitarian coin. That Heda Margolius Kovály had to write a memoir about life under Nazism and Communism is a horror. That she did it so well is a gift

Mussolini conceived it, Hitler commissioned it, Stalin perfected it, Saddam obsessed over the design of it: Totalitarian Art of Barry O'Barrell

Structure, rhythm, precision – any good sentence is good in its own way. The best ones can move peoples’ souls.. Mighty River Mighty Pen