war – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

By Scott J. Pearson | November 28, 2025November 28, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

The Spanish Civil War was a historical precursor to World War II. Franco’s fascism for a time united disparate opposing groups like anarchists and communists. The opposition attracted volunteers from across Europe. However, these groups began infighting among each other, and the opposition ultimately failed. As with most failures, the blame game ran deep among groups. The great English writer George Orwell’s first-hand account provides as much light as can be shown upon the whole…

Biography-Memoir Family

Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind

By Scott J. Pearson | September 14, 2025September 14, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Any book that makes me pour tears in the last chapter is worth five stars to me, and this book fit that bill to a tee. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the war in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge opened a limited slots for one family to emigrate to Vermont. The quota only allows room for three: an older brother, his wife, and one sister. The rest of the family had to separate.…

Biography-Memoir Society

Looking at Women Looking at War: A War & Justice Diary

By Scott J. Pearson | August 24, 2025August 24, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Victoria Amelina died shortly before she was to leave Ukraine to compile her war diary into a book. She left behind an 11-year-old son in another country. She wanted to document the injustice of Russia’s centuries-long attempt to obliterate Ukrainian culture. Before the Russian invasion, she organized Ukrainian literary festivals. After the invasion, she documented war crimes against humanity from this wave of conflict and recurring genocidal attempts throughout history to erase Ukrainian self-identity. Amelina’s…

Religion-Philosophy

The Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race, & Religion

By Scott J. Pearson | November 16, 2022November 16, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

The Baptist faith I grew up with, at its best, tries to transform the world by living out values alien to contemporary society. Clarence Jordan, a son of Georgia in the American South, paid attention to his Christian upbringing, but as an adult, realized that American society often did not follow Jesus Christ’s lead. Religion was often kept in the walls of the church instead of being practiced on the street. This collection of writings,…

Kids Society

PEREMOHA: Victory for Ukraine

By Scott J. Pearson | October 8, 2022October 8, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

The plight of the Ukrainian people in 2022 has been seen and felt across the world. Most humans sympathize with a country whom a rival invaded for doing nothing but existing. Generally, I have mixed feelings about war because it’s incredibly destructive towards universal human life, but the philosophical category of a just war surely exists for situations like these. The Ukrainian military needs to be supported to defend their right to exist. This short…

Biography-Memoir

War & Me: A Memoir by Faleeha Hassan

By Scott J. Pearson | July 9, 2022July 9, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Iraq has encountered consistent upheaval for the past half-century. Most Americans know parts of that story from the news. What most Americans, like myself, don’t know is what that story looks like on the ground, in individual lives. They don’t appreciate how US policy has affected common life, mainly because they haven’t come into contact with an Iraqi. Instead, prejudice, bigotry, and/or cultural bias tends to fill that void. To address that problem, Hassan has…

History

Review: Presidents of War

By Scott J. Pearson | July 30, 2019July 30, 2019 by Scott J. Pearson

When I studied the US Constitution for the first time in the late 1990s as a high-school student, I noticed that it gave Congress, not the Presidency, the responsibility of declaring war. This seemed contrary to my experience, in which the President led the nation into war. It is commonly said that the UN Charter, ratified by Congress, supersedes this earlier practice. Beschloss seeks to tackle this inconsistency head-on. By providing detailed historical analysis, he…