Globe Corner Blogs

On Sept 10th, the White House announced that Army Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta (one of the soldiers profiled in Sebastian Junger‘s most recent book War) will become the first American soldier since the Vietnam War to receive the Medal of Honor non-posthumously, the nation’s highest award for valor in combat. Giunta was honored for his courage in pulling two wounded soldiers to safety while under enemy fire, and then single-handedly rescuing a third critically wounded squad-mate who was being dragged away from the battle by Taliban fighters. He is just one of the many soldiers of Battle Company whom the reader meets in Junger’s gripping and immersive account of his year embedded with a paratroop company in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.  The section of War that describes the firefight for which then-specialist Giunta received the Medal of Honor occurs mid-way through the book and showcases Junger’s in-depth prose style. Continue Reading »

A cane toad nestled in the sand. A freshly hatched, emerald and turquoise moth moving away from its empty cocoon. Then, the intent face of a swimming monkey. A flashy arrangement of Macaws on a wall of a sandy shore. A sloth in its seemingly infinite crawl toward water. These are a few of the images that make up Amazonia, a book of photography compiled over five years by Sam Abell and Torben Ulrik Nissen for Oakwood Foundation.

The Amazon is a fascinating region not only because it is unique, but also because it is a remote, dangerous, and hard to reach place. Few people have witnessed its inner life precisely because of the challenges that a journey there presents. When we think about the Amazon, we imagine nothing less than a dramatic, larger-than-life place teeming with endangered species, but we rarely see the real picture. Knowing this, the authors of Amazonia stuck to a strict dogma of not using any kind of digital manipulation in the production of the images. Continue Reading »

Edited by Dennis Lehane, a native of Dorchester, Massachusetts and author of eight novels including Mystic River and Shutter Island, Boston Noir is a compilation of eleven short stories, snapshotting the lives of seemingly ordinary Bostonians who are all suffering in one way or another. Whether derived from loneliness, failure, suppressed anger, a hunger for power, love gone afoul, or haunting childhood memories, a sense of desperation torments the characters of these fast-paced thrillers.

Each story takes place in a different part of Boston, from Cambridge and North Quincy to Watertown and Boston Harbor. It may be the year 1745 or 2010. The reader gets a taste of the pressures and discrimination of the financial district hierarchy, the sexual crimes of a priest in Southie, and the mental breakdown of a former pop star residing in Beacon Hill. Together these stories create a fascinating mosaic of Boston society, past and present. Continue Reading »

Other Places Travel Guide to Cape Verde

Other Places Travel Guides are a new series of guides  written by returned Peace Corp Volunteers. Not only are they written by people who lived and worked in the areas they write about, but they cover such far-flung places as Cape Verde, Benin, Micronesia and Palau and Namibia.

We were interested to find out a bit more about the new series, and we emailed a few questions to Callie Flood, author of Other Places Guide to Cape Verde, to see if we could find out a bit more. She was kind enough to respond and share some pictures. Continue Reading »