Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man is a compilation of essays by authors who are part of the universe of Burning Man or who engage the many ideas and landscapes on its periphery. By juxtaposing an unusual array of voices and stories, it reveals the complex nature and range of this annual pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert.
Samantha Krukowski (ed.)
London: Black Dog Publishing, 2014
In an effort to promote an image of Allied unity on the eve of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Western Europe, a Joint Anglo-American Film Commission was established with the goal of making a series of short documentaries on the liberation of the continent. Unfortunately, despite the prior planning, the plans for a series of joint films fell victim to competing ideologies about how to showcase the allied campaign. In an effort to salvage the situation the American film maker George Stevens was brought in to make a single long documentary, highlighting the campaign from D-Day to VE-Day. The resulting film, The True Glory, won an Oscar for best documentary of 1945, but in fact was the result of a failure of Allied film propaganda policy.
Remembered today as one of the great popularizers of Jewish history, in the inter-war year the Anglo-Jewish historian Cecil Roth was unable to secure an academic appointment until 1939. As such he turned to writing popular history as a means of support, and while some academic historians discounted his work (then and now), an examination of Roth’s correspondence with individuals such Henry Hurwitz of the Intercollegiate Menorah Society, reveal that Roth worked assiduously to develop an approach to history that would be both academically sound and “useful” to those readers who wanted to understand the contours of Jewish life.