Elaine Mokhtefi and her husband had lived on the Upper West Side in New York City for twenty years. When he died in 2015, she brought him a bench in the park on Riverside Drive, where he liked to sit, gazing at the river through a mass of trees.
Read MoreGeorge W. Bush read The Stranger during his second term in office, at the urging of historian Alexander Horne, whose Algerian war classic, A Savage War of Peace, Bush had also read, we were told. Algeria as a key to understanding Iraq? As if Arabs or “Arabs” were interchangeable? Oh dear.
Read MoreIn 1914, my husband’s uncle Gustav Kirstein bought a lovely painting from the German impressionist master, Max Liebermann – a cheerful summer scene, clearly influenced by Renoir, of rowboats on Hamburg’s Alster River. In 1943 the Nazis stole the painting, along with the rest of Kirstein’s estate.
Read Moreby Suzanne Ruta Picturing Algeria, by Pierre Bourdieu, forward by Craig Calhoun. Edited by Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli, Columbia University Press, 230 pp. Algeria, by Dirk Alvermann, Facsimile edition of a work first published in 1960. Steidl, Germany 2011 In 2004, just around the time the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, an exhibition of photographs…
Read MorePhotograph by Omar D by Suzanne Ruta In My Time A Personal and Political Memoir, by Dick Cheney, Threshold Editions: New York, 565 pp. Abduction, by Anouar Benmalek, Arabia Books, Haus Publishing Co: London, 299 pp Dick Cheney’s memoir, In My Time, is self serving, stonewalling and riddled with glaring omissions. But it does contain…
Read MoreJohn Perivolaris To Algeria, with Love sketches the portrait of an Algerian everyman through the eyes of his ditsy American girlfriend (who hears his hopes and dreams) and his grieving daughter (who knows his bitter disappointments). The novel is set in France 1961, in Algeria, 1988 and in New York, 2003. From Part I,…
Read MoreYves Jeanmougin Translation and introduction by Suzanne Ruta Le Quotidien d’Oran is one of Algeria’s most widely read French language dailies. People say they buy it just to read Kamel Daoud’s page three chronique or column, Raina raikoum, (my opinion, your opinion). In a country where the lone TV station is state controlled and investigative reporting…
Read MoreTo understand the alchemy of Far From Men, it helps to recall the story that inspired it. “The Guest” is not as well known as Camus’s classic The Stranger, but it is a favorite text for teaching the history of decolonization.
Read MoreThe Sea Battle of Navarino, Louis Ambroise Garneray, 1831 From Eurozine: A supranational construct of Europe that imposes boundaries but also makes them negotiable has contradiction built into its genetic code. Looking at maps of Europe at various times since antiquity, this hardly seems new – Europe’s external borders as well as its internal ones…
Read MoreFrom The Hunger Games, Lionsgate, 2012 by James Warner Battle Royale and The Hunger Games are young adult novels in which governments force teenagers to kill each other. Comparing these books to classic works by William Golding and Robert Sheckley suggests that, while becoming more skeptical about governments, we’ve become more trusting about our own…
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