Sunday, July 14, 2019

Cold River and Other Book Reviews

Like Cold River There is now Slow Death of Hollywood Big by Matt Stoller


France’s biggest celebration: What you need to know about Bastille Day The Local France



Is Failure A New Literary Genre?



Karl Ove Knausgård devoted several autobiographical volumes to everyday failures in My Struggle, and since then there has been a deluge of ‘fail-lit’, both in fiction and non-fiction. Could failure be the new literary success? And if so, doesn’t that mean it’s not really failure at all? – BBC

The Soviet Union, it must be remembered, was a regime founded by freelance writers and editors. In other words, a nightmare.”... NightMare 



In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a rival drug dealer. Eighteen years of incarceration later, he reflects on the trials of literary life behind bars 





Read An Unpublished Langston Hughes Essay About An Escaped Chain Gang Prisoner



The piece, a forward written for the Soviet edition of a novel by Georgia investigative journalist John L. Spivak, recounts an incident from the 1927 road trip Hughes took with Zora Neale Hurston in which they were flagged down on the road outside Savannah by a 15-year-old escapee. – Smithsonian Magazine

A World Without Ice

Looking at the impact of the loss of ice in nature

How Lisa Taddeo Wrote Her Revealing Book On Sex

In “Three Women,” Lisa Taddeo reports on female desire and women’s sex lives. The author unpacks her reporting process and how she chose her subjects.

The Phone Call That Changed a Writer’s Fate

Adrian McKinty, whose thriller ‘The Chain’ debuts this week, had quit writing and was driving an Uber in Australia when an agent called

‘The Truffle Underground’ Review: Malice and Mushrooms

The truffle industry is rife with crime and corruption, ranging from false marketing to the kidnapping of truffle-hunting dogs.


Fail again. Fail better,” wrote Samuel Beckett in what has become a familiar mantra in the world of business and tech start-ups – along with ‘Fail fast, fail better’ – where the notion of failure as a route to success has taken a firm hold. Recent years have seen a similar preoccupation seeping into literature, particularly in the memoir sector. Karl Ove Knausgård devoted several autobiographical volumes to everyday failures in My Struggle, and since then there has been a deluge of ‘fail-lit’, both in fiction and non-fiction. Could failure be the new literary success? And if so, doesn’t that mean it’s not really failure at all?

Editor’s Note: War on the Rocks is proud to announce its first Distinguished Book Award. Three times a year, we will recognize a book that we view as essential for the professional development of national security professionals. The first awardee is Cathal Nolan’s The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press). The below article by Nolan is drawn from his research for this book.

Do generals matter? Well, of course they do, on some level. But do they matter as much as military history suggests they do, or as much as most people believe? In thinking about generalship and outcomes while writing Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost, I was surprised to come to the conclusion that generals matter far less in the history of war than is usually represented in traditional military history. This is especially true of those generals praised by military historians as geniuses of maneuver warfare. Superior generals may win a tactical or operational victory by overmatching an opponent in a day of battle or a campaign, but in the protracted fighting that marks major wars among modern nations and coalitions, they do not deliver strategic victory.

Book Reviews


Posted by at