Category: Book Reviews

It’s Easy to Write a Memoir About War – but Hard to Write an Anti-War Memoir

The Intercept
Jan. 8, 2023

War is hell, we hear that all the time. If the cliché is true, another one is too: Depictions of war’s brutality can entice people to seek it out.

The 9/11 wars have yielded a bumper crop of books and films about U.S. soldiers that often have the ...  (Read more)

Stanley McChrystal Accidentally Reveals the Dishonesty of U.S. Generals

The Intercept
Dec. 4, 2021

It is time to make a strange addition to the shortlist of essential documents on the dishonesty of America’s generals: a new book from retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal titled “Risk: A User’s Guide.”

McChrystal was removed from his command by President Barack Obama ...  (Read more)

Peter Handke Won the Nobel Prize After Two Jurors Fell for a Conspiracy Theory About the Bosnia War

The Intercept
Nov. 14, 2019

This is a story about a conspiracy theory that was born in the 1990s, hibernated in obscurity for two decades, and in 2019 appears to have duped jurors into awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Peter Handke, who has denied the Serb genocide of Muslims in Bosnia.

The ...  (Read more)

Peter Handke Won the Nobel Prize. Then His Publisher Circulated a Defense of His Genocide Denialism.

The Intercept
Nov. 9, 2019

IT IS NOT typical for a publishing house, after its author wins a Nobel Prize for Literature, to feel obliged to issue a private 24-page defense of his work, but that’s what it has come down to for Suhrkamp Verlag, the publisher of Peter Handke.

Newspapers in Germany and ...  (Read more)

How the Nobel Prize Succumbed to the Literary Art of Genocide Denial

The Intercept
October 26, 2019

There is a crucial question at the heart of the controversy over Peter Handke winning the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature: Can you be a genocide denier if all you do is cast doubts about the genocide?

Handke’s supporters have argued that it’s unfair to accuse him of ...  (Read more)

Congratulations, Nobel Committee, You Just Gave the Literature Prize to a Genocide Apologist

The Intercept
October 10, 2019

Stockholm is more than 1,500 miles from Sarajevo, and the war in Bosnia was halted in 1995, so there’s a lot of time and distance between the Swedes who just chose the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature and the nasty war that happened in the heart of the Balkans ...  (Read more)

America’s War Narrative Focuses on Its Soldiers. Afghans and Iraqis Are Brushed Aside

The Intercept
September 2, 2018

The young newspaper reporter wanted to write a book about the war he was covering. But the editors who read his proposal turned it down, all of them. They said the book wouldn’t sell because Americans were tired of reading about these violent foreigners and their centuries-old ...  (Read more)