It’s not a genre per se, but a type of novel I find interesting is “The Whole Life in One Book” book. Yes, while many novels span a few years or less, some span the main character’s entire existence — whether she or he dies relatively young or in old age.

Of course a multigenerational saga can do that for a number of lives, but for this post I’m focusing on novels that concentrate the majority of their contents on one person — showing a complete life in a sometimes surprisingly small number of pages. It can be fascinating and poignant to see decades of a character’s family relationships, romantic relationships, jobs, right decisions or wrong decisions, good luck or bad luck, etc. — as well as the real-world news events that swirled around her or him. All while we’re reminded of our own mortality and that life — even if…

Lucía: In Progress “What can it mean for cinema to be revolutionary? Answering a version of this question in a 1977 interview, the Cuban filmmaker Humberto Solás stressed the importance of real-world context. In a capitalist environment, a revolutionary film must strive for the effect of a guerrilla action, transcending mere analysis or exposé. In a socialist society, however, with the revolution already achieved—as in the Cuba of the sixties, where Solás and his compatriots were forging a very particular cinematic New Wave—what is needed is not a call to arms but a reminder of the work still to come. Such films, Solás argued, ‘must present the revolution as a permanent fact, an ongoing process which nothing can reverse.’ Few movies have ever adopted this mandate with the conceptual sophistication and pointed vigor of Solás’s first full-length feature, Lucía (1968), an astonishing reinvention of the historical epic. With its…

By Kim Phuc Phan Thi. “I grew up in the small village of Trang Bang in South Vietnam. My mother said I laughed a lot as a young girl. We led a simple life with an abundance of food, since my family had a farm and my mom ran the best restaurant in town. I remember loving school and playing with my cousins and the other children in our village, jumping rope, running and chasing one another joyfully. All of that changed on June 8, 1972. I have only flashes of memories of that horrific day. I was playing with my cousins in the temple courtyard. The next moment, there was a plane swooping down close and a deafening noise. Then explosions and smoke and excruciating pain. I was 9 years old. Napalm sticks to you, no matter how fast you run, causing horrific burns and pain that last a…

Robert Kelly, Preface from The Journals: “The Journals to my mind are Blackburn’s quintessential work, and demonstrate the way his work knew to go, the power of music he could charm out of everything that came his way, or even looked as if it were thinking about it. The poems and entries are also his last work. The latest writing in it comes up to six weeks of his death in September 1971. From his papers, it is clear that in those last weeks he tried to collect the Journal pages together, and did sense them (as many of his readers from 1968 onward did) as a continuous and coherent book. The present text follows generally the order of what he had collected together and erratically paginated as The Journals. When repetitions, revisions, and versions have been taken away, our inheritance in this particular amounts to a…

“Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a 1972 epichistoricaldrama film produced, written and directed by Werner Herzog. Klaus Kinski stars in the title role of Spanish soldier Lope de Aguirre, who leads a group of conquistadores down the Amazon River in South America in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. The soundtrack was composed and performed by West German kosmische band Popol Vuh. Using a minimalist approach to story and dialogue, the film creates a vision of madness and folly, counterpointed by the lush but unforgiving Amazonian jungle. Although loosely based on what is known of the historical figure of Aguirre, Herzog acknowledged years after the film’s release that its storyline is a work of fiction. Some of the people and situations may have been inspired by Gaspar de Carvajal‘s account of an earlier Amazonian expedition, although Carvajal was…

Heather Cox Richardson writes a valuable and informative history of the politics of guns in America. She makes clear that the current Republican interpretation of the Second Amendment is not rooted in American history.

Please open the link to see the footnotes.

She writes:

Today, a gunman murdered at least 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our…