Tom Gething's Blog

After 9/11 in 2001, W.H. Auden’s haunting poem “September 1, 1939” circulated widely on the Internet. The poem, which described the “neutral air” of New York as war broke out in Europe, seemed to capture the uneasy sentiments of many Americans as they struggled to comprehend the evil done:

September 11 also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coup that toppled Chile’s democratically elected Ma...

In August 1940, Leon Trotsky, one of the architects of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, was assassinated in Mexico City, where he lived in exile. It was the second attempt on his life in less than three months. The murderer, Ramón Mercader del Río, was a Spanish Communist whose orders came directly from JosephStalin.

Stalin had banished Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1928, but Trotsky continued to write harsh criticisms of the revolution’s direction under Stalin’s increasingly tyranni...

Last year, after backpacking for days through the bright white granitic rock in the high country of the Sierra Nevada, my friends and I began descending to our point of departure near Bishop, California. As we made our way down Piute Canyon, we began to see outcrops of sedimentary rock, weathered bluffs so red they might have been out of a Georgia O’Keefe painting. This startling contrast got me wondering how that red rock got there.

Sedimentary rock in the Sierra Nevada
Photo: T. Gething

Annals...

“All happy families are alike,” wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Which, if you agree, goes a long way to explaining why novelists focus on the latter.

When Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters was published in 2002, several reviewers compared the Indian-born writer to Tolstoy. Mistry, who now lives in Canada, is best known for his 1995 prize-winning novel, A Fine Balance, about the Indian Emergency of 1975.

Family Matters, as the title suggests, is th...

Last year I set a goalto write at least one blog post permonth. Sometimes I managed more but, by and large, I stuck to my modest target. (It’s always a balancing act between one’s own writing and reading others.)

As this year began I debated whether to continueat the same pace, and how to continue–whether to use the random approach I’ve used in the past, whichsimply reflects my literary whims, or to applya more focused method to the madness. For example, should Ionly postabout authors I’ve nev...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in 2008, the totalitarian state that imprisoned him, exiled him and turned him into one of its fiercestcritics was already twenty years gone. The Soviet Union—in particular, the despotic regime of Joseph Stalin with its sham trials and violent purges, its forced collectivizations and frozen gulags—was a thing ofthe past, a dark spot from another century. As I began Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle recently, I wondered if the...

Here lies Lester Moore,

Four slugs fro m a .44,

No Les, no more.

* * *

Here lies George Johnson

Hanged by mistake

1882

He was right,

We was wrong,

But we strung him up

And now he’s gone.

—Epitaphs from Tombstone’s Boothill Graveyard

Despite the flippant wit of these epitaphs, Lester Moore was a real person killed in a brawl and George Johnson was wrongly accused and hangedfor horse stealing in Tombstone, a silver boomtown in the Arizona Territory that came to epitomize the Wild West. The 1881 gunfight at...

Traditional Day of the Dead graveside offerings in Oaxaca: cigarettes, tortillas, mole, decorated bread, fruit, beer and, of course, mescal.
Photo credit: T. Gething

Yesterday marked the end of los Días de los Muertos—the Days of the Dead—that syncretic Mexican celebration of Mesoamerican and Catholic beliefs encompassing Halloween, All Saints’ Dayand All Souls’ Day. During this time Mexican families traditionally clean up and adorn the graves of their relatives then spend a night of vigil, ea...

Having spent a week last summer sea kayaking along the coast of northern British Columbia, I was looking forward to Ivan Doig’s The Sea Runners. Doig is a regional writer best known for his books about Montana, notably his novel Dancing at the Rascal Fair and a memoir of ranching life, The House of Sky.

The Sea Runners, published in 1982, is an early work that builds on a footnote of history. (Doig earned a Ph.D. in history before turning to novel-writing.) It is the story of four indentured S...

I’ve never been much of a graphic novel fan, mainly because I prefer to have an author’s words ignite my imagination. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the new collaboration by Mexico’s most highly regarded crime novelist, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and the illustrator Eko.

Pancho Villa Takes Zacatecas (published by Restless Books in an English translation by Nina Arazoza)celebrates so many things Mexican. For one, the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Zacatecas—the bloodiest engagementof the Mexic...