Charité at WarDirected by Anno SaulRelease Date (Streaming): June, 2019 (Netflix) Charité at War, a Netflix series directed by Anno Saul, recounts the period before and during the last major battle of WWII, the Battle of Berlin, as lived by the medical personnel at the renowned hospital Charité-University Medicine Berlin.
Cold Case Hammarskjöld Director: Mads BrüggerReleased: Aug. 16, 2019 (United States) It’s hard not to have noticed that documentary film—a genre once reviled for its standard fare of eat-your-vegetables instructional films—is enjoying a creative and commercial renaissance. All over the world, visionary documentary filmmakers are pushing the boundaries of the
The War Makes Everyone LonelyBy: Graham Barnhart Published: Nov. 2019 (University of Chicago Press) Kill ClassBy:Nomi StonePublished: Feb. 2019 (Tupelo Press) Graham Barnhart’s The War Makes Everyone Lonely and Nomi Stone’s Kill Class both meticulously render the experience of witness through language, rhythm, and form—though from two very different
Wolf Lamb BombBy: Aviya KushnerPublished: June 1, 2021 (Orison Books) Wolf Lamb Bomb, by Aviya Kushner, reminds me of my Jewish friend’s warning to her young daughter: “Remember, no matter where you are, you are never safe.” This dread runs like an emotional third rail through the heart of this
The Latitude of a MercyBy: Stefan LovasikPublished: April 2020 (The New York Quarterly Foundation) With his new book, The Latitude of a Mercy, Stefan Lovasik confronts the nightmarish realities of combat and lingering effects of combat-induced trauma. In poem after poem, Lovasik, who served with the US Army Special Forces
Editor’s Note: At the end of this review are three poems from I Will Not Name It Except to Say that Consequence previously published. Toward the end of I Will Not Name It Except to Say, there is a poem in which Lee Sharkey recapitulates and partially rewrites The Book
Battle Dress: PoemsBy Karen Skolfield (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019)Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry At seventeen years old, Karen Skolfield joined the Army. For seven years she served as a journalist. Now she teaches poetry to engineers. In plain language and free-wheeling verse, she demolishes stereotypes.
Teresa Fazio’s memoir, Fidelis, is the story of agency, power struggles, and life lessons learned on a young Marine’s deployment and over the years after she returns. Her experience places her narrative within the scope of widely varied war literature such as Karen Skolfield’s Battle Dress: Poems, Sebastian Junger’s War,
When Americans refer to the Viet Nam War, most are talking about the decade of active military combat that killed more than fifty-eight thousand Americans and an estimated 1.4 million Vietnamese civilians, ending with the fall of Saigon in 1975. To Americans of a certain age, the reference conjures memories
Matt Gallagher builds a strange but familiar world in his new novel, Empire City. An incredible mix of speculative genres, he has a science fantasy, alternate history/future, superhero, dystopian view on what would happen to our country, and in some ways the world, if America had won the Vietnam War.
As a Marine, I grew to appreciate contour lines—those brown lines and spaces on a topographical map–at The Basic School, in Quantico where I struggled to find marked ammo-cans attached to stakes jutting out of the earth, and hidden in vegetation or plain sight. All Marines learn orienteering at initial
