Category History

Full disclosure: I about cried when I came across the video interviews discussed in this post, a few precious tidbits of which I will share with you below. My near-tears were not from joy, though there was some of that, too.

Mostly, the little emotional roiling going on inside me in the moments after discovering the Mike Wallace interviews of more than 60 years ago was from sheer amazement.

Amazement that within my own lifetime, there was a time when serious discussion on matters of deep philosophical, legal, political, religious and cultural importance was presented on prime time television. Not near midnight, the time slot for today’s night owls to prowl the smart but comedy-based interview shows that cast more of an ironic, sometimes slashing eye on the affairs of the day rather than the sober back-and-forth discussion in which Wallace and his guests engaged.

Not during the dinner-time news hour in 35-s...

Is it possible to kill a city, just wipe out its entire identity and reason for existence, to so decimate its population and dampen its spirit that its surviving inhabitants no longer know who they are, whom to trust and what they care about—or whether they care about anything at all?

To render it, through relentless bombardment, disrupted supplies of food, water and electricity, and concentrated but unpredictable sniper fire from the hills high above, a mere ghost of its once living self, starved of the essential human nutrients of care, security, and community that make a city not just an infrastructure of buildings and roads and utilities, but a place of identity and soul?

These are the underlying macro questions that Steven Galloway explores in his riveting 2008 novel, “The Cellist of Sarajevo.”

Profound because to insist on beauty even amidst ongoing atrocity is a radical act of freedom and resolve ...

There was a saying that made the rounds back in the day (and daze) of the late ’70s, courtesy of the Grateful Dead’s second album, “What a Long Strange Trip It Has Been.” Having now read Anchee Min’s harrowing, urgent memoir of her experience in China during Chairman Mao’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” of roughly the same era, I am here to say: The Grateful Dead don’t know squat about “long strange trips.”

Originally published in the United Kingdom in 1993 and the U.S. a year later, “Red Azalea” is the kind of coming-of-age story that is initially much less about triumph than it is about mere survival.

By the end of her tale, that survival nevertheless qualifies as triumph aplenty, given the travails she contends with and eventually escapes from in the merciless, rigidly proscribed world engineered by the personality cult that was Mao Zedong. Mao founded the modern “People’s Republic of China” in...

So much suffering. Catastrophe upon catastrophe, really, the long chronicle of humanity’s vast inhumanity and indifference to our fellow humans a kind of psychosis draped in the flags of country, religion, revolution, and perhaps the most fundamental, reptilian attachment of all: greed.

We want to look away, of course, the poet having long ago told us we “cannot bear very much reality.”

In truth, it is natural, and human, and necessary, to carry on so the world’s accumulated misery does not plunder our own capacity for the joy and love and yes, frivolity and ease that should also be everyone’s birthright, at least in some blessed moments out from under suffering’s dark, stifling cloak.

Yet how are we to know what befalls those in distant, denuded and warring lands absent those who consent to bearing witness, to staring the fullness of reality in its face and conveying what they have seen?

Few have stared a...

A sense of poignancy runs all through the recent Netflix documentary, “The Greatest Night in Pop,” and its branches spread out in multiple directions.

One branch brings the simple passage of time into sharp relief. As we gaze upon a gallery of superstar musicians in their creative prime who assembled on one fabled night in Los Angeles nearly 40 years ago to sing one song—“We Are the World”— on behalf of African famine relief, we know that a good number of them are no longer bound to earth. (Michael Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles, Al Jarreau, Tina Turner, Kenny Rogers, Waylon Jennings, two of the Pointer Sisters).

Another branch shows those still living who consented to interviews these years later. We see at least some of them as barely recognizable ghost images of their physical selves in 1985. (As are we, if we were around then.) (As I was…)

Not that they aren’t still vibrant, engaging and fu...