• LIFE

  The Future isn't now

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 29/08/2019

  » A term I keep encountering is "The Future". You see it on billboards everywhere. Stadiums, department stores, condos, supermarkets, restaurants, theatres, whatever. They eschew the current autos and mobile phones and computers. Space rockets are only a generation or two away.

• LIFE

  Religion and warfare

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 06/09/2019

  » What all religions, sects, cults have in common is that each believes it is the true one, the others not only unworthy but spawns of the devil, deserving to be liquidated.

• LIFE

  Ravens' feast

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 27/12/2018

  » This reviewer's understanding of historical novels is that the authors do historical research on their topic, using actual figures and imaginary ones where need-be, to write essentially factual and hopefully interesting stories. But not all historical novelists follow this form. Some are more concerned about their own largely fictitious story than the actual events behind it.

• LIFE

  Isis thwarted

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 26/12/2019

  » Until the 20th century, jihadists had no bones to pick with the US. Their ire was directed at the UK and France who coveted their lands, and the Jews trying to carve out their own. They got good press when T.E. Lawrence led the Arabs against the enemy Ottoman Turks. The silent film The Sheik romanticised them. The Riffs were favoured in their uprising against Spain. They didn't participate in the North African campaign in World War II.

• LIFE

  What if?

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 25/07/2019

  » A cine buff -- contemporary, silent, foreign -- since my childhood in the Big Apple, still with a good but not photographic memory, I recall a French movie about a wealthy widow who decided to satisfy her curiosity by looking up her old boyfriends. She wondered what would her life have been like had she married one of them.

• LIFE

  Just a thought

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 30/05/2019

  » I don't mind admitting that I winced when I plucked an 800-page novel from my review bag, having long advocated that authors don't need more than 400 pages to say what needs be said. The back cover describes it as an espionage novel. I don't recall Ian Fleming or John le Carré penning tomes.

• LIFE

  Targeted billionaires

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 08/06/2018

  » When a rich man meets his maker, I pause for few moments, not to mourn his life but to wonder what becomes of his wealth. Of no use to him now, is it buried with him? Like the pharaohs, he intends for it to accompany him in his next life? Is it inherited by his son? To do what with?

• LIFE

  End of fossil fuel?

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 20/12/2019

  » I'm not a linguist. I'm not proud of it. English is my first and only language, which is not to say that it's the only language worth knowing. I studied other languages in school, but couldn't get the hang of them. Neither am I well-versed in English. I'm not being modest. I look at Webster and Oxford with a groan.

• LIFE

  Friends and enemies

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 22/11/2019

  » People have friends and enemies -- fair-weather and true friends, run-of-the-mill and mortal enemies. It takes an emergency to sort them out.

• LIFE

  Too ambitious

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 20/09/2019

  » We are told as children that we must have ambition to make something of ourselves. What we aren't told is that it must have its limits. To be sure, most people are too lazy to make the effort needed to fulfil it. They figure that just getting along is enough. Anyway, they tell themselves that the odds are stacked against them. That those who succeeded did so by cheating or were just lucky.

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