CRITICAL THINKING: “HBO’s Questioning Darwin: Creationists Go Full Retard” / Dusty Smith
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Tag Archives: history
CRITICAL THINKING: “Ken Ham Defeats Himself in 90 Seconds” / Dusty Smith
ATHEISM: “Dare to Think for Yourself!” / Dusty Smith
CRITICAL THINKING: “An Open Letter To My Christian Fans” / Dusty Smith
CRITICAL THINKING: “Duck Dynasty is Fake!” / Dusty Smith
ANTITHEISM: “Women’s Emancipation” / Elizabeth Cady Stanton
REASON: “History Channel’s ‘The Bible’ in Under Ten Minutes” / Dusty Smith
BOOK EXCERPT: Craig Brown / “J.D. Salinger’s Letter To Ernest Hemingway”
The following is an excerpt from “Hello Goodbye Hello” [Simon & Schuster,26.95]:
J.D. Salinger seeks out Ernest Hemingway The Ritz Hotel, 15 place Vendôme, Paris Late August 1944.
The twenty-five-year-old Jerry Salinger is experiencing a terrible war. Of the 3,080 men of the 12th US Infantry who disembarked with him at Normandy on D-Day, only a third are still alive.
His regiment is the first to enter Paris. They are mobbed by happy crowds. Salinger’s job as an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps entails weeding out and interrogating Nazi collaborators. As they go through Paris, he and a fellow officer arrest a collaborator, but a crowd wrests their prisoner away and beats him to death.
Salinger has heard that Ernest Hemingway is in town. A writer himself, with a growing reputation for his short stories, he is determined to seek out America’s most famous living novelist. He feels sure he will find him at the Ritz, so he drives the jeep there. Sure enough, Hemingway is installed in the small bar, already bragging that he alone liberated Paris in general and the Ritz in particular.
LITERATURE: In Writing, Fuentes Shed Light On Poverty, Inequality / (NPR’s Morning Edition AUDIO)
Carlos Fuentes was the son of a Mexican diplomat and spent years living abroad, including in the United States. But Mexico — the country, its people and politics — was central to his writing.
Fuentes, one of the most influential Latin American writers, died Tuesday at a hospital in Mexico City at the age of 83. He was instrumental in bringing Latin American literature to an international audience, and he used his fiction to address what he saw as real-world injustices.
[…]
One of his most famous novels was The Old Gringo, about an American writer who travels to Mexico to die. It was made into a Hollywood movie starring Gregory Peck as the writer and Jimmy Smits as a Mexican general.
The Old Gringo became the first novel by a Latin American writer to make it to The New York Times best-seller list.
Read transcript, and listen to NPR’s Morning Edition AUDIO here . . .
A wonderful scene from the movie can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40A24x_Kwuc&feature=player_detailpage
Always Question Authority 