Luminous “JFK: The Last Speech” essay collection reverberates 55 years after one October day
By Robert R. Thomas On Oct, 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy gave his last public speech, at Amherst College in western Massachusetts. The occasion of Kennedy’s Convocation Address at Amherst was the ground-breaking ceremony for the Robert Frost Library. Frost, an avid friend and supporter of JFK, had taught at Amherst for many years and had died the previous January. A month later, JFK himself would be dead, assassinated in...
Review: Connor Coyne’s “Urbantasm: The Dying City” original, dark, magical, and infused with Flint
Urbantasm Book One: The Dying City by Connor Coyne Review by Robert R. Thomas Connor Coyne’s Urbantasm is the most original take on Flint I have read to date. Set in the fictional Rust Belt city of Akawe, Michigan, “an hour’s drive north of Detroit,” Coyne’s allegorical tale is a serial novel of four volumes the author says has taken 22 years to create. Book One: The Dying City will be published in September. The jacket of my...
Review/Commentary: “Destiny of the Republic” a timely look at an honorable president
“When he (James Garfield) was still a very young man, he had hidden a runaway slave… In Congress, he fought for equal rights for freed slaves. He argued for a resolution that ended the practice of requiring blacks to carry a pass in the nation’s capital, and he delivered a passionate speech for black suffrage…‘Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the...
Detroit 1967: a movie, a book, and a searing memory of when the riots hit Flint
by Harold C. Ford “A riot is the language of the unheard.” –Martin Luther King “The officer hit him and said, ‘We’re going to kill all of you black-ass nigger pimps and throw you in the river. We’re going to fill up the Detroit River with all you pimps and whores’” –from The Algiers Motel Incident, John Hersey, 1968 1960s Mississippi? No, 1960s Detroit. During the evening/early-morning hours of July 25-26, 1967 law...
Print show honoring DAS Print great William Stolpin opening at FIA Sept. 16
By Jan Worth-Nelson Note: Sadly, we have been notified that Bill died this morning, Aug. 21. Considering how much he loved space, it seems right that the sun will go dark as he passes to the other side. RIP, William Stolpin. William Stolpin, one of two remaining members of the legendary Southeast Michigan artists’ collaborative known as DAS Print Company, is being honored in a retrospective of 29 of his works at the Flint...
Review: Quoting Comey,”The Chickenshit Club” eyes why the DOJ goes easy on bankers
By Robert R. Thomas My wife, a retired librarian, came across a blurb for this book, of which she said, “This looks to be right up your alley.” She was correct, as usual, on many levels. I am hardly the only American who has never been satisfied by any answers as to why no banksters went to jail in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial malfeasance. In The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute...
The Latest Edition of East Village Magazine Is Available For Download Here (pdf)
