Two philosophical perspectives are at play in the novel “The book of form & emptiness”, informing Ruth Ozeki’s telling of a story about a young boy, Benny, whose father dies in a meaningless accident. Sean Sheehan Benny and his mother Annabelle are left to cope with their grief, […]
Book reviews
Julian Assange: the human cost of empire
You don’t have to like professional tennis to know that dictatorships like China silence those who speak out of turn and you don’t need a Ph.D. in political science to know that some “democracies” have their own way of pursuing a similar objective. Sean Sheehan The UK has […]
Breathing scared
Raging against the injustices and fractures that have come to define the USA is a sane response to the state of that country and the roots of this awareness were laid down in the 1960s by people like the poet Allen Ginsberg. Sean Sheehan “The fall of America […]
Spain and the Holocaust
Over the course of the Second World War, Spain remained officially neutral or ‘non-belligerent’ as it declared itself in 1940, despite the ideological affinity of Franco’s Catholic-military dictatorship with the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. Sean Sheehan This affinity had been made obvious as early as 1937 […]
Photographing limbo
The word limbo, signifying a state of waiting and uncertainty, used to be the name of a theologically-based location. Sean Sheehan It was a place, neither Heaven nor Hell, an in-between spot in God’s landscape that had a geographical exactitude: existing on the border of Hell – the […]