By Elaine Donnelly
Extending sexual misconduct to combat units
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
The National Book Awards on Wednesday honored both longtime writers and new authors, from Louise Erdrich for "The Round House" to Katherine Boo for her debut work, "Beyond the Beautiful Forevers."
The year 1945 marked the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany and the defeat of Imperial Japan. At the same time, it ushered in the birth of the atomic age. It also was the year the Soviet Union's military occupation of Eastern and Central Europe took hold, following the Red Army's triumphant march from Stalingrad into Berlin.
Robert Caro, Junot Diaz and the late Anthony Shadid were among the finalists announced Wednesday for the National Book Awards.
Robert Caro, Junot Diaz and the late Anthony Shadid were among the finalists announced Wednesday for the National Book Awards.
"Of all the odd things about the Soviet Union, perhaps the oddest was the way in which official propaganda — which told people what the world was supposed to look like — so often triumphed over everyday experience, which revealed that things were different," writes Anne Applebaum at the New Republic.
The world seems to be divided into people who see the silver lining in a darkly clouded sky, and those who are transfixed by the slightest bit of cloud in an otherwise azure sky.
"They had eliminated the most capable of their potential opponents," Ms. Applebaum writes. "They had taken control of the institutions they considered most valuable. They had created, from scratch, the political police."
Ms. Applebaum argues that communist ideology and Marxist-Leninist economic theory contained the seeds of their own destruction because their very claims to legitimacy were based on promises of future prosperity that never came.
