Tag: Cold War

Reader’s Corner: ‘A Legacy of Spies’

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

The new John le Carre novel, A Legacy of Spies, is out now. And yes, George Smiley is back.

My review is at PopMatters:

It’s been about a quarter century since John le Carré appeared to wrap up his cycle of stories about the tantalizingly inscrutable spymaster George Smiley and his cabal of British spooks locked in mortal struggle with Moscow Centre. The Secret Pilgrim (1990) in which the semi-retired Smiley waxed wise about the entanglements of espionage to spellbound recruits while their trainer reminisced to himself about dark deeds from the past, was a ripping good read but felt like an excuse for le Carré to clean out some unfinished drafts from the bottom of his drawer…

You can read an excerpt here.

Screening Room: ‘Bridge of Spies’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment
Mark Rylance and Tom Hanks glare like they mean it in 'Bridge of Spies' (Dreamworks)
Mark Rylance and Tom Hanks glare like they mean it (Dreamworks)

In Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, based on a tangled and fascinating true story, Tom Hanks plays a New York lawyer who gets swept into a Cold War scandal when the CIA needs help rescuing a U-2 spy plane pilot shot down by the Soviets.

Bridge of Spies opens everywhere this week. My review is at Film Journal International:

Bridge of Spies sits at the lit-fuse junction of Cold War paranoia, the legal ethics of treating enemy combatants, the dividing of Berlin, and nuclear holocaust. But the work of three screenwriters—Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen—one of the era’s most astute directors of thoughtful popular cinema, and even Mark Rylance and Tom Hanks operating in pitch-perfect sync can’t wrestle this incredible, fact-based but ungainly moralistic spy saga into shape…

Here’s the trailer:

New in Books: ‘American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of The 1950’s’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, OmniculturalLeave a comment

My review of the nine novels in the Library of America’s new two-set volume American Science Fiction is now up at The Millions:

There was something in the air during the 1950s in America that bred an especially grand strain of science fiction whose like was never witnessed before and hasn’t been since. It was a heady concoction: postwar triumph and trauma, unprecedented technological advances, the true advent of mass media swamping the atmosphere, that pseudo-fascistic hum of nationalistic propaganda and blacklisting, and the incessant reminder that a mushroom cloud could end it all… like that. The new Library of America two-volume collection, American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe, dusts off nine lesser-known novels that illustrate the breadth and depth of what was happening in science fiction during that decade. With its crisply typeset cloth volumes totaling almost 3,000 pages, the sturdy box is a welcome reminder of past joys for some readers and a striking introduction to fresh futuristic wonders and Cold War chills for others…

You can also read essays on these novels by authors from William Gibson to Neil Gaiman at the Library of America site here.