Bookworm Room

Tweet Seasickness.  It’s an utterly vile condition, worse, I think, than any other type of motion sickness.  When you’re seasick, your entire body is rebelling against you.  Worse, there’s no escape.  You’re trapped in the middle of an endless ocean, feeling about as bad as it’s possible for a human to feel. Add something to [...]

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Tweet Ted Bromund is worried that Obama, by going to both Buchenwald and Dresden in the same trip is about to do something symbolically awful.  Buchenwald, of course, was one of the infamous Nazi labor camps located right in Germany itself.  It was not a death camp, and was not used specifically to exterminate Jews, [...]

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Tweet Paul Begala wrote an article at HuffPo contending that, following WWII, Americans executed Japanese as war criminals for water-boarding.  While I’m certainly willing to concede that water-based tortures numbered amongst the myriad tortures the Japanese used against POWs, it is absolutely ridiculous to believe that these Japanese soldiers were executed because of the water [...]

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Tweet In a comment to my earlier post about talk with an ideological foe being dangerous, Gringo mentioned a classic anti-Nazi piece of Hollywood propaganda (made when Hollywood viewed America as the ally, not the enemy).  I found it at YouTube (of course), and share it with you. And for those of you who are [...]

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Tweet I bet if I say “The Great Escape,” you instantly have that melody (see below) running through your head.  The real great escape, though, was much more than a melody or a movie.  Check out this interactive web site to see the amazing tunnel those POWs dug. Hat tip:  W”B”S

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Tweet I didn’t know about it, but in 1945, a celebrated dogfight occurred over Germany, with an American pilot, James Finnegan, shooting down Germany’s top ace, Gen. Adolf Galland.  Here’s what happened in the air 63 years ago: In an interview Mr. Finnegan gave 12 years ago for a Web site devoted to Galland’s career [...]

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Tweet The Progressives are crying for our boys to come home, but these seem to be crocodile tears, designed to hide a desire to harangue and insult them when they do return. After all, whether you’re looking at the Ivies’ refusal to allow military recruiters on campus or Code Pink’s assault on the Marines, you [...]

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Tweet Almost exactly a year ago, I did a post I entitled Manly men, Girly men and Peter Pan. In it, I tried, ineffectively, I admit, to figure out America’s cultural trends regarding men. There’s the manly trend, exemplified by the Marines and much admired in certain romance novel genres; the Peter Pan trend, which [...]

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Tweet Did you hear the story about Irving Berlin’s lunch with Winston Churchill during WWII? It’s a very funny story, it’s true, and it’s part of the larger and very wonderful story of Irving Berlin’s musical This is the Army. Berlin wrote This is the Army both to boost American morale and to raise money [...]

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Tweet December 7 marks the 66th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. It is certainly a day which will live in infamy, but it’s also a day that the free world should remember with gratitude. Up until December 7, while America had been helping England in sub rosa fashion, she had otherwise ostensibly [...]

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Tweet There is an extraordinary story hidden behind the latest album Swedish soprano Anne-Sofie von Otter is releasing. The album itself should be lovely and moving, because it’s a collection of songs from Terezienstadt, including lullabies a nurse composed for her charges in the days (weeks?) before she and they were shipped off to Auschwitz [...]

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Tweet During any other war, the following list that Vasko Kohlmayer complied would show treasonous conduct. In this War, it’s politics as usual: • They have repeatedly conceded defeat in Iraq with Harry Reid claiming ‘this war is lost;’ • They purposefully downplay any and all American military successes; • They have sought to portray [...]

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Tweet There’s a new movie out about “homegrown religious fundamentalists who kill in the name of God” — and Manolah Dargis, who writes movie reviews at The New York Times really wants to like it. You’ve got to admire Manolah. After all, who in America doesn’t want a solid documentary about the homegrown Western Islamists [...]

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Tweet Note: I originally posted this bit of family history in August 2006. I’m reposting it now, inspired by two things: Ken Burns’ excellent “The War” (I swear the man’s a conservative) and Ahmadinejad’s pretending that the Holocaust’s historical reality is open for some sort of debate. I think both — the one almost sublime, [...]

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Tweet Ken Burns’ new series about World War II is off to a good start although his stately pace can often be somewhat sleep inducing.  It’s one of those slightly bizarre situations where it’s worth your while to force yourself to stay awake. Part of the first episode includes a run-down of what Americans were [...]

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Tweet As I’ve noted before, my mother spent the war years interned in a Japanese concentration camp in Java.  These camps were not Nazi death camps, but they were no picnic either, with a horrible attrition rate from disease, starvation, overwork and abuse.  (See here for more information about one of the camps my Mom [...]

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Tweet [I haven't had the chance to think this busy weekend, let alone blog.  For some reason, though, I can't get out of my head the WWII stories of a few people I met, long after the war, when they were old and gray.  I'm therefore resurrecting this post because I think it tells a [...]

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Tweet I’ve mentioned before that I’m a persnickity lady who likes my comforts — a fact that only serves to increase my admiration for those American troops dealing with the dangers and discomforts in Iraq. I know from my father, who fought in North Africa during WWII, how particularly nasty desert fighting is. He had [...]

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Tweet The story of Dunkirk is an amazing one. In May 1940, about 250,000 British troops (as well as about 120,000 French troops) found themselves stranded there, victims of the spectacularly successful German Blitzkrieg. They had virtually no weapons, no organization and nowhere to go: the seemingly unstoppable Nazis were to the East, the impassable [...]

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Tweet Mr. Bookworm still finds troubling my political transformation, which is actually something I understand.  After all, when we stood under the chuppah so many years ago, he knew what he was getting — a stalwart Democratic life partner.  It was bad enough when his siblings, after 9/11, betrayed him by going conservative, but his [...]

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Tweet The award for best opening sentence definitely goes to Myles Kantor, writing about Günther Grass (novelist and Nazi), who opens his article with this: The line between moralist and schmuck is very thin. I didn’t find the rest of the article quite as good, but it’s interesting, and worth reading just as a sign [...]

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Tweet Danny Kaye had his first staring role in 1944′s Up In Arms. It’s quite a silly movie — with “silly” being a redundant adjective because we’re talking about Danny Kaye (whom I loved as a child and like as an adult). In the movie, Kaye plays a hypochondriac who is drafted. (Dana Andrews, as [...]

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Tweet I think this is a pretty cool story about codes and code breaking: German spies hid secret messages in drawings of models wearing the latest fashions in an attempt to outwit Allied censors during World War Two, according to British security service files released on Monday. Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the [...]

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Tweet Joe Rosenthal shot the iconic Iwo Jima photograph that shows the Marines raising the second flag on that blood-soaked island. As Rosenthal made clear, this was not a posed photograph; it was not false propaganda: Ten years after the flag-raising, Rosenthal wrote that he almost didn’t go up to the summit when he learned [...]

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Tweet We have had sitting around for months a DVD called The Long Way Home. It’s a documentary about the Jewish survivor’s plight in the three years after World War II. I really didn’t want to watch it, because I knew it would upset me — hence, it’s long sojourn on our coffee table. As [...]

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