Friday, June 6, 2008

Attention Span

As you can imagine, after three weeks of living in the same room, everyone has a pretty good assessment of other soldier's character. My favorite was this overheard moment. One of the sergeants is talking about a private who has some difficulty paying attention.
"I look this fool right in the eye and talk to him. Not five seconds later a bird flies by and BAM! He's gone. I say, 'CONCENTRATE!' He comes back to this world, but five seconds later he's gone again."
The speaker is a tall, fit impeccable soldier talking about a short, dumpy young man with no small resemblance to a rodent. It would make a great 10-second video.

Stalingrad: War and Peace for the Twentieth Century

Vasily Grossman ’s Stalingrad is an ambitious novel, and remarkably, it succeeds in its vast ambition. When Grossman set out to tell the st...