Peace church?
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I appreciated "War stories" (March). I am totally against war, and especially this misbegotten war in Iraq, but I understand why many Catholics as well as other Christians do not share this same anti-war stance. Although in recent decades the popes and many...

Mercenaries: The History of a Norm in International Relations.
Mercenaries: The History of a Norm in International Relations, Sarah Percy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 280 pp., $60 cloth. While this is but one in the recent surge of publications on the topic of mercenaries and private military companies (PMCs), Sarah Percy's latest work certainly...

Benedict Kiely's troubles fiction: from postcolonialism to postmodernism.
From the beginning, Benedict Kiely has been a deeply 'rooted' writer, drawing inspiration from his native place in and around Omagh, Co Tyrone. Like the seanachai, he speaks from deep down in his environment, his stories a species of dinnseanchas, bedding the locale in their utterance, moving with the...

Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Africa: From Slavery Days to Rwandan Genocide.
Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Africa: From Slavery Days to Rwandan Genocide, edited by John Laband. The Greenwood Press Daily Life through History Series. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 2007. ix, 301 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). With warfare in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, and...

A tale of two leaders: Stanley Bruce and Kemal Ataturk.
THIS IS THE STORY of the parallel lives of two men who fought on opposite sides at Gallipoli. They each came to lead their countries, never met, but grew to respect and understand each other after the bloodletting on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915. Stanley Melbourne Bruce...

United States fly high: while the United States and the Soviet Union were the first to re-explore uncrewed aircraft technologies since the second world war in the 1960s, notably through Ryan and Tupolev (but with mixed results in both cases), Israel was really the first nation to turn the discipline into a viable proposition in the 1980s, before being overtaken in terms of market size by the United States.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Compared to spending on manned aircraft (the Lockheed Martin F-22 alone receiving over $ 3.5 billion in FY08), that on drones is small, but rising impressively. The Washington-based Teal Group estimated in late 2007 that the worldwide annual spend on drones will almost double from...

Walker.
Walker Directed by Alex Cox; screenplay by Rudy Wurlitzer; cinematography by David Bridges; starring Ed Harris, Peter Boyle and Marlee Matlin. DVD, color, 94 mins., 1987. A Criterion Collection release, www.criterionco.com, distributed by Image Entertainment, www.image-entertainment.com. Walker has long been an important film for me. It was...

Their sacred honor; Indictment of tyranny is at Declaration's core.
COLUMN: IN OUR OPINION The Declaration of Independence is rightly viewed as a towering expression of America's most lofty ideals, not the least being the notion that individuals have unalienable rights and that the power of governments are derived not from divine right but "from the consent...

Military transformation and modern warfare; a reference handbook.
9780275994051 Military transformation and modern warfare; a reference handbook. Sloan, Elinor C. Praeger Security International 2008 183 pages $55.00 Hardcover Contemporary military, strategic, and security issues UA10 Sloan (international...

Sixty years of success.
JUST 60 years ago, David Ben-Gurion declared that after a lapse of two millennia the state of Israel had resumed its existence. There was dancing in the streets of this revived state. At the time, the Nazi Holocaust had just dealt Jews what was virtually a deathblow, and survivors...