Posts by Bruce Berger
Video Never Tells the Whole Story
Video never tells the whole story. I learned this decades ago as a prosecutor in the Criminal Section, Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice. Yes, that’s the same unit that presumably will review the FBI investigation into the shooting death of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Video evidence of alleged police misconduct was relatively…
Read MoreWhat Does It Say About Our Government When There Are Mass Resignations from the Department of Justice?
The news goes from terrible to worse than terrible. https://www.ms.now/news/doj-civil-rights-division-officials-quit-harmeet-dhillon The entire leadership of the Criminal Section, Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice has resigned in protest of the USDOJ’s apparent decision not to investigate the police shooting death of Renee Good. I worked there for four years, and most of the time…
Read MoreForeword Clarion Review of Forgiven: A Novel!
Review of Forgiven (9781685136734) — Foreword Reviews “In Bruce J. Berger’s spiritual novel Forgiven, a trip to Greece prompts life changes for each member of a busy Jewish family. … The story assumes an urgent, intense pace prior to the Greece trip, after which the book focuses on lush landscapes and personal reflections more. A storm…
Read MoreThe Book Publicist Angle
It’s long past time for my rant on the subject of so-called book publicists. I say “so-called” because book publicists do very little to actually publicize their clients’ books. So what do they do? Well, they are great at promises. “I promise you that I have great contacts in the media industry in the DMV…
Read MoreCoincidence, Mass Shootings, and Mourning
What are the chances that two entirely separate mass shootings are both perpetrated by graduate physics students who seemingly failed in the study of plasma? (I don’t have any understanding of plasma, despite my undergraduate degree in the sciences. Plasma was never on my radar, and I managed to get past my college physics course…
Read MoreMissing New Orleans and Judge John Minor Wisdom: A Remembrance
It’s been fifty years since I was a law clerk to the Honorable Judge John Minor Wisdom, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. How is it possible that so much time has passed? In many ways, my first post-law-school job seems like it could have…
Read MoreLiterary Titan Silver Book Award … to Forgiven: A Novel!
Moving up in the competition with a Silver Book Award from Literary Titan … Literary Titan Silver Book Award | LITERARY TITAN! Let this be only the first step!
Read MoreForgiven: A Novel Advances in Chanticleer Book Awards!
We made it to the long-list~ The 2025 Somerset Long List for Literary & Contemporary Fiction… See more chantireviews.com The 2025 Somerset Long List for Literary & Contemporary Fiction | Chanticleer The last of the Long Lists are here! It’s Short Lists all the way down after this! Congratulations to these authors who made the…
Read MoreGenerative Artificial Intelligence in the Writing of Novels
I won’t let my students use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in my Creative Writing class and I won’t use it myself. It’s technically possible to use GAI to “create” something that looks like literature, i.e., an essay, a poem, or story. And a would-be writer can create a prompt and ask (tell?) Chat-GPT to write…
Read MoreHow Does a Writer Learn About Main Characters?
How does a writer learn about main characters? That’s another way of asking how does a writer ensure that these characters are round, meaning interesting and complex and, therefore, completely believable as human beings? I would guess that all writers have different strategies for achieving this effect. One way that works for me is to…
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