Jim Werbaneth - Line of Departure

I'm a big fan of Max Brooks, especially World War Z, his definitive oral history of mankind's war to the death with the undead.

First published in 2003, three years before his better-known towering work, is The Zombie Survival Guide. By its nature,… Continue

Today, a man named Marek Edelman died at age 90 in Warsaw. Edelman was a tireless campaigner against hate, and for freedom and human dignity, opposing Communism in Poland, and working with the Solidarity movement in its campaign for a democratic homeland.

Had he done none of this though, Marek Edelman would still deserve remembering, for he was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto upri… Continue

For those among us who think that nature provides the most spectacular views in the night sky, I bring you a project from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). As reported by CNN, it's an 800-million-pixel, 360-degree edge-on panorama of our own Milky Way galaxy, all taken with a standard digital camera by French astrophotographer… Continue

The BBC today reported on a newly revealed postscript to the expulsion of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. It should not be a surprise that Generalissimo Chiang longed to return to the Mainland. What might be surprising is how far along the planning was, as late as the 1960's. The People's Republic suffered a severe famine, due to Mao Zedong's rapid modernization and the… Continue

I'll save everyone the problem of waiting for a plot spoiler, so here it is: The Japanese win at the end of the movie. And that ending is really really boring.

Seriously though, Inglourious Basterds is a film sure to appeal to many history buffs and wargamers. A tour de force from the inimitable Quentin Tarantino, the leading practitioner of intelligent actio… Continue