George Fetherling
George Fetherling is a novelist, poet and cultural commentator
George Fetherling's Latest Posts
Vietnam ‘snow job,’ Lawrence of Arabia and Pol Pot
At about the midway point between Pearl Harbor and the collapse of the Twin Towers, the United States was the victim of another giant surprise attack. The pummelling assault on Hué, the old imperial capital of Vietnam, close to the sea, south of the Demilitarized Zone, was the work of communist Viet Cong guerrillas and […]
Russia’s revolutionary ideas
Canada is celebrating its 150th birthday this year and on the other side of the world perhaps the most profound such observance right now is the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Several important new books on the subject are being published. All of them struggle, some more successfully than others, to explain the […]
A big secret that everybody knows
I have a framed poster on my wall at home that illustrates 14 different types of small explosive devices. The same poster is found in nearly every elementary schoolroom in Laos (and Cambodia, too) where it’s intended to teach the little ones to refrain from, for instance, playing with landmines. My copy hangs above the […]
Auto Draft
When the yoga instructor says “Go to your happy place,” I go to Shanghai in the 1930s. I’m not being facetious. In the years between the two world wars, Shanghai had an abundance of a priceless commodity that the world finds in such short supply today: freedom. I’ve spent much of my life looking for […]
A strange tale of Palestine and Hollywood
Ben Hecht was a famous screenwriter and author who invented a pair of movie genres — the gangster film and the screwball comedy — and wrote two of the best Hitchcocks: Spellbound and Notorious. In fact, he wrote literally scores of fine films, often without credit, as was common practice in Hollywood in the ’30s […]
Little-known fact: Winston Churchill was a shopaholic
In 1929, Winston Churchill, who was then the chancellor of the exchequer in Stanley Baldwin’s government, was making a tour of Canada and the U.S. In a speech in Vancouver on Sept. 23, he said, “We see Canada growing in every way — education, civilization, numbers and wealth.” That was the day prices on U.S. […]
Diplomatic behaviour
Many authors who write thick biographies of important political or cultural figures follow up later by editing their subject’s letters or private papers for publication. Norman Hillmer of Carleton University, perhaps the leading academic historian of Canadian-U.S. relations, has done the reverse. In 2013, he published O.D. Skelton: The Work of the World, 1923-1941 (McGill-Queen’s […]
Revisionism revisited
As it happened, Ronald C. Rosbottom, a professor of French culture at Amherst College in New England, was in Paris on Jan. 7, 2015, the day of the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. A bit of bad luck, one might say, but perhaps a bit of good luck as well, for Rosbottom […]
A search for the middle ground
In 1962, George Woodcock, the Vancouver literary and social critic, published what turned out to be his most famous book, one that has stayed in print ever since. He called it Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. He always described himself as a “philosophical anarchist,” a phrase coined in reaction to that stereotype […]
Out of Africa
In 2008, a British journalist named Tom Burgis, who helped cover Africa for the Financial Times, witnessed the mass murder of men, women and children at a place called Jos, along the invisible boundary that separates Nigeria’s Muslim north from its mostly Christian south. But the full effect of what he saw there didn’t strike […]
Recent Comments