From the Stacks: June 9, 2006

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Utne receives some 1,200 magazines, newsletters, journals, weeklies, and zines. Add in hundreds of books, CDs, and DVDs, and it's a flood of media that lines the walls of our library and piles high on our desks. All the ideas, people, and stories inspire lively daily chatter, but they can't all fit into our bimonthly magazine. So we share the gems here in our weekly editions of 'From the Stacks.' Check in every Friday for the freshest highlights of the independent and alternative media.

Literature has explored addiction in its many guises: drugs (Junkie), sex (Choke), and wagering (The Gambler). David Axe and Steven Olexa are adding to the canon with War-Fix, a graphic novel that follows a journalist with a jones for war. After coming of age in the glow of TV broadcasts of the 1991 Gulf War, David risks his personal relationships and his life to cover the war in Iraq, where he discovers he's not alone in his affliction. The book is like a mix of Anthony Swofford's Jarhead and Francisco de Goya's 'The Disasters of War,' switching from scenes of aimless boredom to nightmarish visions of brutality. Due out this month from Nantier Beall Minoustchine. -- Bennett Gordon

The June/August issue of PanGaia -- a journal of pagan-oriented commentary, poetry, and fiction -- contains as much historical background as it does current perspective. Ranging across disparate and distant cultures, the commentaries inevitably pose the question: How can the practices and beliefs of long-gone pagans influence and inform the pagans of today? Dangerous ground, when those past practices often involved human sacrifice, as did those discussed in Archer's 'Gifts to the Gods,' in which Archer looks at the 'Bog People' of Northern Europe. But the discussion proves rewarding: Neither for nor against the practice, Archer approaches the topic with curiosity and reverence -- which ultimately is exactly what these bog-preserved bags of bones deserve. -- Nick Rose

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