Canter Bridge

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It’s a shame this American-made film portrayal of a WWI German unit trapped in the vanity of trench warfare didn’t have currency in 1930’s Germany. It might have made a dent in the German people’s hunger for the bellicose rhetoric happily supplied by the young National Socialist movement.

Alas, we forget too soon.
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Now eclipsed by the Streep-Redford film presentation that appropriated its title, Karen Blixen’s memoir of life on her Kenyan coffee farm speaks movingly of the more benign side of colonialism in Africa and of one European’s self-evident love for the land she had made her own.

Sadly, Blixen’s lush descriptions of ‘her people’ are often judged too quickly by modern criteria of racial attitudes, a game that is like asking this early twentieth-century writer to wrestle with one arm tied behind her back. If it can be granted that there was anything good about Europe’s colonization of Africa, then Bliksen (Isak Dinesen was her pen name) is its face.
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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

The actual events that led to the siege of the Alamo and the establishment of the short-lived country called Texas lie shrouded in the fog of contested legends. Like the Middle East today, two peoples necessarily tell the story of the same land in far different ways. It is often said by Texans today that Mexico is achieving through immigration and fecundity what Santa Ana could not.
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