WWII
Tall Tales of the South Pacific
America’s wartime sailor turned Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener celebrated the South Pacific’s “infinite specks of coral.” But those precious coastlines and the Indigenous people who relied on them were left to suffer when the U.S. dumped tons of military equipment and food into the waters off Vanuatu.
Swastikas in Damascus
A death notice appeared in a Lebanese village north of Beirut last September of a man with a curious first name. It took me back to my school days in Syria and the unusual interest many of my fellow schoolboys had in the history of the Second World War.