One of us heard something about Ernest Hemingway hating Ivan Turgenev, and we both worshipped Hemingway so we thought we should read Turgenev and learn to hate him too. Then we picked up "Fathers and Sons."
My dad discharged his weapon in action only once, while serving guard duty on a train to Sasebo transporting Korean men conscripted by the Japanese Imperial Army for hard labor during the war.
"I was talking to the neighbor, and we could hear a rocket whistle. When you hear the whistles, then at least you know it’s going somewhere else, not right on top of you. It hit the block behind us.”
Malcolm speaks to us directly in the same powerful, raw language that made him a proud militant, describing his upbringing, his crimes, his bigotry and misogyny, and his evolution into a human rights activist.
“Historically, the occupier of Palestine has always met disaster, beginning with the Jews themselves,” Barbara Tuchman begins. “The country’s political geography has conquered its rulers.”
James Agee suspects we are unworthy of reading his book, just as he suspects himself unworthy of writing it. He does not allow us to meet a single member of his families until a third of the way through.
Tom Bates drives about 10,000 kilometers a month. He has a few regular stops and warehouses between Kyiv, where donations arrive, and the Donetsk region in the east. “I travel around to Dnipro, along the Dnieper River, to Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Bakhmut when we could. There’s a lot of action on that eastern front.”