...history itself ceases to exist when it degenerates into a mere collection of facts unconnected by a story—and this story cannot be found without a ...history itself ceases to exist when it degenerates into a mere collection of facts unconnected by a story—and this story cannot be found without a transcendent dimension that sees these facts from within and beyond.
Such is the thesis statement of the life of Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus' closest companions—some speculate his lover or his wife—the first witness to the Resurrection, and the author of the Gospel of Mary, rediscovered at the turn of the 20th century. (Note: the actual written text was not penned by Mary herself, but recorded, like the canonical gospels, by someone or someones unknown, likely in Greek, before being translated into the discovered text's language, Coptic). The Gospel of Mary was one of many gospels rejected during the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, where the Christian church was founded and the accepted texts, which would form the Bible, were accepted. Attempts to suppress the Gospel of Mary has only served to elevate it, and its author, into the realm of legend and mysticism. Leloup, a French theologian, translated the Gospel from its original Coptic (Egyptian) into French and provided extensive commentary and interpretation of Mary's words and her role in Christianity. This book is an English translation of his original, which was published in 1997.
Mary, Miriam as she is known in Hebrew, represents the Feminine, the Imaginal, the nous aspects of Christianity that elevate it to its most spiritual—the act of faith—and yet ground it in the utter simplicity of its fundamental message—that of love.
My reaction to this book is a set of swirling ribbons of thought and emotion. I am fascinated by Mary Magadalene's life and found many doors opening into the novel idea that's needling my brain. As a reader long fascinated by this era of history, I'm eager to explore more. As a person who was raised an evangelical Christian, who walked away from the church many years ago, and who is now reexamining her spirituality, I connected at a profound head and heart level with the Gnosticism inherent to Mary's gospel and its message of transcendence and transformation....more
What better book to read during the current heat wave than a true thriller set in the Arctic? My thanks to Angela, who recommend this one after readinWhat better book to read during the current heat wave than a true thriller set in the Arctic? My thanks to Angela, who recommend this one after reading my reviews of David Grann's The Wager, another shipwreck saga. I found this even more gripping and tragic, perhaps because it feels almost modern in comparison (1880s compared to 1740s) and is faster-paced in its recounting of the heroism and tragedy of exploring uncharted waters.
Through the late nineteenth century, it was widely believed that a warm Pacific current penetrated the Arctic ring of ice, leading to a verdant land and the possibility of a trade routes to Europe. The North Pole remained virtually the last unexplored region. America, which imagined the potential of resources and trade after its purchase of the Alaskan territory from Russia in 1867, couldn't abide that there may be land there for the taking and Russia or Western Europe might get to it first. So with the blessing of the U.S. government and the financial backing of a mercurial millionaire who owned what would later become The New York Times, thirty-three men set off in a small sailing vessel from San Francisco in July 1879 in search of a mystical passage through the Arctic to the other side of the world.
Astonishingly, just weeks after the U.S.S. Jeannette embarked on its ill-fated voyage, definitive word came down from other explorers and scientists that there was no warm current; there was only sheets and mountains of inescapable ice. But by then it was too late. Not even the recent, rapid advances by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison were enough to reach these brave men and head them off at the pass: they would spend two years at sea, first trapped in the ice, and then forced to cross hundreds of miles of it on foot in a desperate search for land, civilization and rescue.
Enough. I won't spoil the ending if you don't already know it (I didn't- in fact, I'd never heard of this story. Then again, that's the magic of books!). This is unputdownable, don't-miss-it historical fiction....more
First-rate historical narrative nonfiction! I felt like I was on the set of Master and Commander although I reckon Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany smelFirst-rate historical narrative nonfiction! I felt like I was on the set of Master and Commander although I reckon Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany smelled a bit nicer than the blokes on The Wager.
It's hard to wrap the head around what these sailors endured, even before hoisting anchor. I had never given much thought to the term 'press gangs,' and was horrified to learn that it was the virtual enslavement of men and boys by the British Navy to serve on ships that were short of troops. The elderly, sick and disabled were yanked from convalescent homes, men were kidnapped off the streets in broad daylight, all to spend years at sea in rat and lice infested vessels, many never to return.
And so it was with The Wager and its sister ships who made up an ill-fated 18th century fleet with a mission to chase Spanish galleons around South America and into Pacific waters. David Grann recounts the sailing and shipwrecks and survival with gripping detail, taking the reader into the heart of storms, the ghastly ravages of starvation and disease . He brings to life multiple historical characters and it is their fates and the aftermath of their survival and return to England that propel this breathtaking plot.
The book is thick with sources at the end, so the actual narrative is concise and moves briskly. Fascinating, enthralling and highly recommended....more
Patrick Radden Keefe could write ad copy for bran cereal and it would be riveting. I first fell under the spell of this New Yorker staff writer with 2Patrick Radden Keefe could write ad copy for bran cereal and it would be riveting. I first fell under the spell of this New Yorker staff writer with 2019's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. He is a storyteller above all, a quality made all the more impressive and endearing when his indefatigable research and reporting are considered. He can distill an ocean's worth of facts into a unputdownable slake of a tale that leaves you gripping the book so hard, your fingertips turn white and go numb.
The Sackler name, before Big Pharma's role in creating and sustaining the opioid crisis for financial gain became widely reported, was not unfamiliar to me. I envisioned Upper West Side wealth, scions and socialites; I was aware of university endowments. But beyond that, I knew nothing of their connections to the prescription drug industry. Not until I read Beth Macy's devastating Dopesick in 2019.
Whereas Macy's book focused on the excruciating effects of OxyContin in central Appalachia in the late 1990s through the 2000s, Keefe's is an origin story: the origin of the Sackler family dynasty and of the drug they created that has gutted so many American lives. This is a laser-focused exposé of greed, power and obsession as one family, in one generation, achieved the American dream. But theirs was a dream that unleashed a nightmare across America in a very brief span of time. OxyContin was introduced in 1996 and thanks to an unprecedented marketing campaign designed by the Sackler brothers and Purdue Pharma, its annual revenue grew from $48 million in 1996 to $1.1 BILLION four years later. The resulting mass addiction to OxyContin drove a rise in addiction to morphine and heroin. Nearly 76,000 people died of opioid overdoses in the USA in 2021, a tragedy that is directly linked to addiction to prescription opioids, and that addiction linked directly to the Sackler family.
Empire of Pain reads like a thriller; this is Mr. Keefe's particular genius. He spools out the texts and testimony in a way that even though you likely know the outcome, you are enthralled. He shows you how the Sacklers were able to wield their weapons of mass destruction for so long, until at last, the walls came tumbling down. He pays attention to the least among the dynasty—the drivers and doormen and maids—drilling down into a story with relentless attention to detail but a keen understanding of what makes a plot propulsive. An outstanding read.
And yet another cautionary tale. Purdue Pharma was hardly alone in their grift, greed, and murderous intent. From Vioxx to Avandia, talcum powder to Wellbutrin, from Pfizer to Glaxo Smith Kline, J&J to Merck, how anyone can continue to believe that pharmaceutical companies are anything but hives of corruption and fraud is beyond me. Don't say you weren't warned....more
I placed this dual-biography on my TBR list a few years ago and wondered if I would ever make time to read it. But there is a right time for everythinI placed this dual-biography on my TBR list a few years ago and wondered if I would ever make time to read it. But there is a right time for everything. I bought a paperback edition several months ago and during a lull in the steady stream of library book holds, I fell into this exceptional portrait of two of my favorite artists.
The initial spark for me was curiosity: I didn't know that the Bohemian writer and the French sculptor were friends. In fact, I knew next to nothing of Rilke's life—just his dreamy poetry and his endlessly quotable Letters to a Young Poet. Because of my experiences living in France, I was more familiar with Rodin, the taciturn and difficult man who seemed to exemplify every cliché about famous French artists: a womanizer and a genius, obsessed with his craft and his legacy.
These two men formed an unlikely bond. They were separated by language — Rodin spoke only French; Rilke was a native German speaker; by age — Rodin was Rilke's senior by 35 years; and by temperament. Rodin was a proud Gaul and gruff workaholic who wasted little time on self-reflection and chatter. Rilke was a navel-gazing intellectual who flitted from Germany to France to Italy, chasing a muse and fleeing his domestic responsibilities.
To call them friends, at least initially, is a bit of a stretch. In 1902, Rilke was commissioned to produce a monograph of Rodin. Rilke still was a struggling young writer; Rodin already a lion of French culture. Rilke left the artists' colony in Germany where he and his artist-wife, Clara Westhoff, were raising their infant daughter, and relocated to Paris. Rilke would live off and on in Paris for the rest of his too-short life. The city would draw him back time and again because it was the center of creative energy, the sun around which all stars of the arts revolved.
Rilke eventually became Rodin's secretary, managing an immense volume of correspondence until writing for Rodin consumed all of his time, overriding his own work. Rodin, deeply insular and jealous of attention paid to anyone but him, threw Rilke out after he discovered that Rilke had established separate correspondence with some of Rodin's benefactors. Their fractious relationship finally healed during the war years, not long before Rodin's death in 1917.
You Must Change Your Life is not just a portrait of a complicated relationship between two artists. It is an examination of artistic influence and of an influential city in transition. Not long before Rilke's birth in 1875 Paris was transformed from a medieval labyrinth dotted with Gothic behemoths into an industrial Mecca of wide streets, gas lamps and marauding bands of hooligans. This Paris first broke artistic convention with the wave of Impressionist painters; just a few decades later it shocked the world again as it embraced the fractured styles of Fauvism and Cubism.
It is also the story of an artist in the making: Rainer Maria Rilke, who defied his traditional Austrian family to become a writer. I struggled with my reaction to this portrayal of Rilke. A poet whose work I so revere was in fact a whining, insecure gadabout who abandoned his wife and child to pursue his own interests. He was clingy with lovers, a feckless husband, and dispensed artistic advice he himself scarcely followed. But to his credit, he used his insecurities to push himself to become a better writer and a more empathic human. In the final years of his life, he nurtured the creative efforts of the young son of his final romantic relationship. That young man became the celebrated French-Polish painter Balthus. And Rilke never wavered in his admiration for and support of Rodin; it was his monographs of Rodin that helped elevate a working class sculptor to a venerated symbol of Gallic art.
I read this dual biography intending to explore the difficult relationship between Rilke and Rodin as a potential path to a new novel. I found that path, but not in following the lives of its principal subjects. Rather, it was the women who played second fiddle to these men who captured my imagination: Clara Westhoff and her best friend Paula Becker in Germany and Camille Claudel in France. These artists defied convention and pushed through societal walls to pursue their art. Claudel paid the highest price: her doomed affair with Rodin overshadowed her own extraordinary work. She died in obscurity in an insane asylum. Westhoff and Becker were friends and artists before they met Rilke, and Westhoff would eventually marry him. It is their unconventional lives that fascinate me. I'm excited to see where this interest, and these women, take me next.
You Must Change Your Life is immersive, deeply researched and illuminating. Highly recommended....more
When I returned to the States in early 2008 after living in New Zealand, I was keenly aware of the impending financial disaster. The collapsing housinWhen I returned to the States in early 2008 after living in New Zealand, I was keenly aware of the impending financial disaster. The collapsing housing market had already hit the U.K., and by cultural, political, and economic extension, Australia and New Zealand, months before the first unsettling frissons were felt in the States. I became fascinated with the crisis and read every article and listened to every interview and syndicated show my liberal media mainstays like the NY Times and NPR offered. I knew all about subprime mortgages and credit default swaps.
Not once in those two+ years of following the wobble and ultimate collapse of the world economy did I hear talk of the true origins of the financial crisis in the United States: the introduction of subprime mortgages in Black and brown neighborhoods in the 1990s. This predatory lending was first tried out on vulnerable homeowners — those with the least access to fair capital and the least protected by consumer regulations — before the process was perfected and turned out to the wider public in the 2000s.
Why the omission of this vital aspect of our recent, shared, painful history? Whether deliberate or not, I think it points to the central premise of Heather McGhee's brilliant and illuminating book: white people — liberal or conservative — won't or can't conceptualize racism as a problem that affects them until they are shown how heavily they bear its costs.
McGhee uses the literal metaphor of the cemented-in swimming pool to show how far we (whites) have gone to cut off our nose to spite our face: swimming pools across the US were drained and even filled in with cement when municipalities were ordered to integrate in the 1950s. White America showed it was more willing to deny access to a city pool to everyone than to allow a Black body in its waters.
This ingrained racist myopia led to the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016, when millions of votes were cast in fear and anger by whites who felt left behind in a country increasingly Black and brown. They defaulted to racist scapegoating of the dreaded "other" for their job losses, income inequality, more expensive healthcare, impossible housing costs instead of placing responsibility where it belongs: on corporate America and tax, health, education, and economic policies that benefit an extremely select few: the wealthiest one percent.
McGhee targets issues that we all embrace as core values and shows how racism has corrupted our systems and harmed each and every one of us, including voting rights, Social Security, health care, education, and housing and advocates for a multi-racial approach to defeat the zero sum game that supporters of systemic racism have long promoted.
Although I believe that racism can be defeated on an individual level by integrating communities, I'm not so naive to believe that's ever going to happen on any meaningful level unless we focus on changing systems: laws, policies, practices. You can expend all the energy you want arguing Critical Race Theory, but until we make it a priority to work in solidarity — McGhee's Solidarity Dividend — to overhaul our legislation, crush corporate and big money lobbying and eliminate barriers to public goods and services, e.g. health care, housing, education, and the ballot, we'll be stuck in an endless loop of virtue signaling on social media.
Black and brown folk have carried the greatest burdens of the pandemic, with their limited access to quality health care, their predominance in "essential" jobs that make them physically vulnerable, and distrust of a public health system that has used and abused them so often in our history, and now public sentiment is once again "othering" those who are hesitant to be experimented on once again. Tragically, the pandemic has only widened the gap between the rich and poor of all colors - the laptop class that is free to lockdown at home and send their children to private schools vs those who service their needs- and I fear it will ratchet up the zero-sum game chatter to an even greater frenzy come the next election cycle. It's on liberal, white America who has benefitted the most in the weird, twisted turns of the pandemic to make certain this doesn't happen, but I don't hold out much hope that our increasingly-divided nation will find its footing before then.
This is an extraordinary book — engaging, fascinating and vital. It's a workbook, really — opening the possibility that with the macro issues that McGhee presents, we have the opportunity to take it micro- what are the zoning policies in our counties and municipalities? Who has access to transportation, to school busing, to the ballot box. We have it in us to question and change these policies. Will we?
A note: I was interviewed for and am briefly featured in The Sum of Us. It was honor, albeit humbling, to have shared my awakening to my own racism and continued work to unlearn that which does harm, and to learn and relearn positive action in my journey toward solidarity....more
In his ten-part, 18-hour documentary on the Vietnam War, Ken Burns does not once mention the work of Catherine Leroy, a French photographer who was thIn his ten-part, 18-hour documentary on the Vietnam War, Ken Burns does not once mention the work of Catherine Leroy, a French photographer who was the first journalist to parachute with a combat troop into Vietnam and whose photographs of American soldiers brought the agony of war into living rooms across America in the pages of Time and Life magazines; nor of Frances Fitzgerald, the American journalist who won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer and the Bancroft for Fire in the Lake, her seminal book about the war that she wrote after years of reporting from the front lines; nor does he acknowledge Kate Webb, the New Zealand-born, Australian foreign correspondent who became UPI bureau chief in Phnom Penh and was captured by North Vietnamese troops operating out of northern Cambodia.
This fact comes late in Elizabeth Becker's extraordinary You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War and by the time you read it, you will be as angered and bewildered by this inexcusable omission as I was. These three women, whose experiences during the Vietnam war are interwoven into a narrative that eventually includes Becker's own, when she arrives to report from Cambodia crushed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, took on a white male establishment in one of the most dangerous places on earth and fought personal battles to claim their right to report on the tearing apart of Indochina by the American government.
They each arrived of their own accord, paying their way and picking up scraps as stringers —freelance reporters — until the quality of their work became undeniable and they were offered more stable and lucrative bureau jobs. Frances "Frankie" Fitzgerald was the daughter of a wealthy Boston Brahmin family with direct connections to D.C. power core, but even this worked against her as she had to prove she wasn't in Vietnam because of her family, but because she had something of value to show the world about the war. Tiny and ferocious Catherine Leroy carried all her own gear, marching alongside brawny American Marines and capturing the moments of agony and fear of soldiers and civilians alike. Kate Webb, soft-spoken and beautiful, arrived in Vietnam with the burden of recent tragedies that primed her to convey the misery of war.
Kate and Catherine died in their early 60s within a year of each other, both of cancer likely brought on by years of heavy drinking and chain-smoking, their chosen self-medication to manage severe PTSD. Frankie Fitzgerald is alive and well and recently won the inaugural Society of American Historians Tony Horowitz Prize for distinguished work in American history.
You Don't Belong Here is a riveting portrait of these women and their contributions to journalism, and of Vietnam at the height of the war. It gave me a new understanding of America's failed policies, its ignorance and arrogance, as well as a grounding in the experiences of the civilian Vietnamese and Cambodians who suffered so terribly.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough....more
A fresh and lovely dual biography of two extraordinary women who met at the intersection of science and art in the singular landscape of Belle Époque A fresh and lovely dual biography of two extraordinary women who met at the intersection of science and art in the singular landscape of Belle Époque Paris.
Marie Curie's story is the better known: an immigrant scholar from Poland who transformed chemistry, medicine, and physics with her discoveries of core elements, including radium, and presented the world with the weighty legacy of radioactivity.
Loïe Fuller was famous in her day, but her star faded as the decades passed and other more appealing celebrities took her place. Loïe was an American dancer who settled in Paris as a young woman, where her eccentricities were more readily embraced. She became renowned for her innovative choreography, which incorporated lighting and flowing fabrics, both of which she designed. She patented dozens of inventions, all as a self-taught explorer of chemistry and physics, using art to discover scientific principles, and her stage lighting techniques transformed modern theatrical and dance productions. Along the way, she collected admirers of her work- Auguste Rodin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste and Louis Lumière, Stéphane Mallarmé and Queen Marie of Romania.
But it is her special friendship with Marie Curie that Liz Heinecke gracefully and deftly conjures here. Through extensive reading and research of Curie's and Fuller's memoirs, journals and correspondence, as well as those of their close contemporaries and family members, Heinecke dramatizes their lives to create a story of two pioneering women who would not be bound by the conventions of society. Curie was dismissed time and again by the male-controlled worlds of academics and media, which simply could not believe that a woman would be capable of scientific discovery and innovation. Fuller had an easier time as an artist, but even she had her innovations appropriated or disregarded by men.
This is a fascinating, wonderfully written book, rich with details of its time and place, when artists and innovators, free spirits and agitators found relative freedom in the ripe peach of Paris prior to World War I and just between the wars. Absorbing and luminous. Highly recommended....more
Such mixed feelings about this investigative biography. Becky Cooper, a New Yorker staff writer and Harvard alumnae, spent ten years pursuing the storSuch mixed feelings about this investigative biography. Becky Cooper, a New Yorker staff writer and Harvard alumnae, spent ten years pursuing the story of Jane Britton, a Harvard archeology graduate student who was murdered on January 6, 1969. Fifty years would pass before the crime was solved. Curiously, although Ms. Cooper was relentless in her attempts to uncover the truth, it was advances in technology that finally cracked the case. Or at least gave an answer that closed the official investigation.
Jane, who was only twenty-three when she was bludgeoned to death in her apartment near the Harvard campus, was a complicated young woman. Raised in upper middle class privilege—her father was Vice President of the storied women's liberal arts college, Radcliffe—Jane was exceptionally smart and self-aware, sexually expressive, and outwardly confident. Her lovers, boyfriends, and potentially predatory professors were all suspects in her murder. Ms. Cooper pursues every angle over several years, interviewing friends, family, students, professors, police detectives—anyone who might be concealing threads of the truth, even without realizing it. Multiple suspects present themselves: a charismatic professor; a fellow graduate student who was also a suspect in the disappearance of another female archeology student while the two were alone on a dig in Labrador, Canada; a jealous ex.; a rejected potential lover. The crime scene itself was an enigma. Jane's murder appeared to have ritual elements: a spray of red ochre powder across her body, burial artifacts arranged just so.
Surrounding the mystery is the looming presence of Harvard, its literal and figurative edifices serving as barricades to truth. The misogyny inherent in its power structure, ruled by credentialed white men, takes down able, qualified women one after another. By the end, this really doesn't change, particularly when Jane's murderer is revealed at last.
The true crime element is fascinating and Becky Cooper is an excellent writer. But her insistence at inserting her own coming-of-age story into Jane's is odd and disingenuous. Whatever she's going through during these many years of investigation is certainly valid and emotional, but it's awkwardly threaded through, as though her editors sent her back to add all these parts to personalize the narrative after she'd written Jane's story. They are unnecessary and distracting.
And then there's this weird elephant in the room. After all this time spent pursuing multiple avenues, the one no one considered becomes the lede. So there's this weird sense of "why did I read all of this? I could have just Googled it..." It feels as though the real story is left untold, but I'm not certain what that story is....more
Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth—that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than we would like to believe wGermany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth—that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal. It is easy to say, If we could just root out the despots before they take power or intercept their rise. If we could just wait until the bigots die away. . . It is much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unquiet minds, needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place. It is harder to focus on the danger of common will, the weaknesses of the human immune system, the ease with which the toxins can infect succeeding generations. Because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man, it is us, all of us, lurking in humanity itself.
Caste, Chapter 19, The Euphoria of Hate
I read this passage just days after a mob of thousands descended upon the Capitol building, stormed past barricades and police, intent on mayhem and some, murder. The hours of footage, much of it taken by the not-ready-for-Mensa mob themselves and rebroadcast on social media, is now being used to track and arrest the individuals. It's sickening, heartbreaking, and terribly disturbing. You can see the euphoria of hate in the faces, the glee taken in destroying property, shouting, spitting, spraying bear repellent in the faces of the police, and far worse. Nearly all were in a frenzy. And those who weren't? Those are the ones I fear the most. They weren't caught up in the madness, they are the madness. The well-armed, trained, prepared extremists, intent on ultimate destruction.
In denouncing the violent siege, many have declared that "This is not us. This is not who we (the American people) are."
Oh, but it is us. That is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all. This happened in our America, by Americans. Continuing to deny it is to ensure that it will happen again. And again.
On January 6, Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents tweeted, "We have seen caste in action with our very eyes."
If you wonder how we got here, to this moment, to watch a rabid mob lay siege to the nation's Capitol unroll like a disbelief-suspending Steven Seagal B-movie, Caste will help make sense of the utterly senseless. I may have hoped for the stories that made Wilkerson's first book The Warmth of Other Sons so gripping and spilling over with humanity. Caste is more distant, pedagogical. It is treatise on the human hierarchies present in the United States and India, and in Nazi Germany prior to its defeat, their histories, similarities, effects and costs.
What happened last week in Washington D. C. is a direct result of the caste system in the United States and what the process of upending it means to those who benefit from its existence. As Wilkerson points out, when there is a change in the script—say, a Black man is elected president — that puts the bottom rung of the caste at the very top, it can hardly be surprising that backlash will ensue.
Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying, because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. James Baldwin
The backlash brought us Trump, it brought us new, stronger, more coordinated, bolder white supremacist groups whose rage was suddenly mainstream, normalized and amplified by mainstream media, alt-right media, and elected officials. A new reality was created, one that made the upper castes victims of the lower castes: white evangelical conservatives were suddenly under attack by immigrants, Muslims, Blacks and Peoples of Color, liberal elites... the list goes on. The backlash led to open acceptance, celebration even, of misogyny, racism, bigotry, science denialism, and ultimately The Big Lie. But Trump did not create this steaming hot mess of a Republic. It created him. This system has existed for four hundred years and will not go away, or retreat more than a figurative inch, on January 20.
While it is tempting to vilify a single despot at the sight of injustice when, in fact, it is the actions, or more commonly inactions, of the ordinary people that keep the mechanism of caste running....
It will go away when enough of us decide to eliminate the caste system by empathy and action, awareness and connection, what Wilkerson calls Radical Empathy. The voices that are pro-humanity must rise up and drown out the screams of hate and intolerance. Rather than trying to change the minds of those hellbent on holding their ground as Kings of the Mountain, we'd do far better reaching out our hands to join those above, below and around us to form an impenetrable chain of intelligent, active, determined and compassionate human beings.
And continue to seek justice for those wronged, for damn sure.
This outstanding biography of the most amazing Virginia Hall is more riveting than any well-crafted fictional thriller. Hidden in part because of her This outstanding biography of the most amazing Virginia Hall is more riveting than any well-crafted fictional thriller. Hidden in part because of her clandestine work, but mostly because history is written by men for their own glorification, Virginia's story was largely buried in the annals of military legend and lore. Her extraordinary life and what she accomplished in France during World War II is pieced together in meticulous detail by Sonia Purnell, who balances cold fact with brilliant storytelling, bringing Virginia to three-dimensional, vibrant life.
Hall, always the adventuress, left her native Baltimore for Europe in the mid-1930s. Barely twenty, she fell hard for the liberal lifestyle that awaited her in Paris and after finishing her education, she signed on to work for the State Department. Restricted to secretarial roles in Italy and Turkey, where she lost a leg in a hunting accident, she volunteered to drive an ambulance in France in 1940 just as the Germans began invading en masse.
And then Hall, a woman, an American, a striking, tall, redhead with a loping gait to compensate for her prosthetic leg, became one of the first operatives of the newly-formed British spy agency, Special Operations Executive (SOE). Virginia Hall, hastily trained, barely supported, was sent into occupied France to stir up support for an underground movement against the Germans and their French sycophants, the Vichy government. The groundwork laid by Virginia in Lyon became the heart of the French Resistance.
The moral and physical hardships endured by Virginia — from being undermined by her male colleagues in the field and at HQ in London, to starvation, constant fear of being discovered, crossing the Pyrenées on foot in winter with a damaged prosthetic leg, the near-misses, the dreaded double agents, knowing of the torture and murder of friends, colleagues, and the many who risked, and lost, their lives building the Resistance around her — most agents lasted months before they cracked or were outed and killed. Virginia endured for six long, lonely years.
Despite the massive amount of research detailing operations and its vast list of supporting characters, A Woman of No Importance is nimble and vibrant, just like the woman whose story it illuminates.
I'm delighted to learn this story is being made into a feature film. Virginia Hall is larger than life and her story deserves to be proclaimed from the rooftops. A highly recommended read!...more
Carolyn Forché was twenty-seven when she traveled to El Salvador for the first time in 1978. She was already an established poet, and a professor of pCarolyn Forché was twenty-seven when she traveled to El Salvador for the first time in 1978. She was already an established poet, and a professor of poetry, at a university in southern California, but relatively naïve in world events when one morning, a stranger knocks at her door, holding the hands of his two little daughters. He clears a space on Forché's dining room table and begins to graph the history of El Salvador, in pictures and in tumbling, insistent words.
The man was Leonel Gómez Vides, a cousin to the exiled Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría. Forché had spent the previous summer in Spain translating Alegría's poetry, and Gomez determined that he wanted a poet to bear witness to the coming civil war in El Salvador. Specifically, he wanted Forché.
Forché's searing, remarkable memoir is both a reportage of the brutal recent history of El Salvador, and the recounting of how an activist is created. Gómez, whose force is personality compels Forché to travel with him, is a wealthy owner of a coffee plantation in El Salvador with a shadowy reputation. Some think he is a CIA operative, others certain he is leading the resistance movement. Whatever his standing, he loves his country with a fierce and reckless intensity, and his charisma opens doors to the most dangerous and sacred of spaces. After just a few days, he convinces Forché to travel with him, directing her to “See as much as you can. Memorize everything. Especially the layout and the locations of everything you think human rights groups should see.”.
Gómez takes Forché to remote villages where she sleeps with strangers who live in the most dire poverty, yet who feed her and offer her shelter; to a prison where she sees men in solitary confinement literally boxed up in walled cages; she witnesses a death squad vanish a young man from a city street in broad daylight; she attends mass led by famed Archbishop Oscar Romero, whose assassination launched the official war. And she sees bodies, grisly encounters with the tortured and dismembered, that offer her just a glimpse of what this eventual twelve-year war, largely funded by American money and American military training, would exact on this tiny, beautiful country. 75,000 were killed, more than 550,000 Salvadorans were internally displaced with 500,000 becoming refugees. The reverberations of the conflict are felt today, in the refugees who continue to flee poverty and political terror in Central America.
What Forché learns about herself as an observer and recorder of the human experience is the subtle subplot to this astonishing narrative. The writing shifts throughout the book, starting out as lyrical and distant and transforming to crisp, urgent reporting. The young woman is transformed, and the reader is transformed with her. “It was as if he had stood me squarely before the world, removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes, she writes of Gómez's influence on her understanding of the world.
Haunting, vital, unforgettable. A chilling and necessary read. ...more
Right now, the only visible sign that you've crossed the border between the United Kingdom and Ireland is the change on road signs from miles to kilomRight now, the only visible sign that you've crossed the border between the United Kingdom and Ireland is the change on road signs from miles to kilometers. In the twenty-one years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast, signaling an end to the decades-long conflict known as the 'Troubles', the checkpoints have come down, the armed border patrols have been decommissioned, the observation towers are nowhere to be seen.
With Brexit looming, however, the visible division between the two countries may return, and with it, renewed calls to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and reunite it with the Republic. The prospect of reopening old wounds that are still so very close to the surface is so very real for communities on both sides of the border. Patrick Radden Keefe's incendiary modern history of the bloody sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland could not be more perfectly timed. Say Nothing is part murder mystery, part political thriller, and all true. It reveals not just the cost of war, but the costs of peace.
On a cold winter's night in a dreary ghetto apartment block outside Belfast's city center, a widowed mother of ten is forcibly removed from her apartment by masked gunmen. It is December 1972 and Jean McConville is never seen again. Her body was found at last in 2003, but who murdered Jean and why was buried with her over thirty years before. By following the trail of Jean's disappearance, Keefe leads us into an epic history of the tearing apart of Northern Ireland by religious and political strife. He weaves together the stories of the most influential actors in this most complex and layered of plays, among them Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams, the tactician and politician who revived and controlled the IRA, Dolours Price and her sister Marian, who became IRA warriors and folk heroes, and many others who contributed their personalities, voices, and/or weapons to the struggle to either unify the two Irelands or protect the might of the British crown.
Keefe holds both sides in balance, showing the IRA and its political arm, Sinn Fein, in as glaring a light as the British army- both sides committed atrocities that they later excused as the price of war. Keefe follows former members of the IRA as they age into regret or defiance, compounding the tragedy of lives given for a cause that seems bewildering in retrospect.
Gerry Adams may have been an architect of the peace agreement, but his bizarre denials of involvement in the IRA, when all evidence shows him as its principal leader in the 70s and 80s, render him a sociopathic figure. His Judas betrayal of his IRA contemporaries adds to the emotional haunting of many of this story's central figures and makes mockery of what these young people thought they stood for- several of whom died during the course of this book's writing.
Say Nothing is a riveting, gut-wrenching work of investigative journalism that explores a complex and devastating episode of modern Irish history through intimate portraits of lives deeply affected by the conflict. It is outstanding. Easily one of the best books I will read all year....more
I rarely purchase books. I don't have the budget or the space; I'm not a collector of things. But every rare once in a while I come across a book so lI rarely purchase books. I don't have the budget or the space; I'm not a collector of things. But every rare once in a while I come across a book so lovely and profound, one that speaks directly to the writer and poet in me, I know it is one I must have one my shelves. Landmarks is just such a book.
A collection of essays and reflections on place as well as a series of glossaries of geography, geology, topography, weather and all other possible aspects of the natural world, Landmarks is a gorgeous reminder of what it means to breathe and exist completely in the world, the ineffability of the seasons, the immensity of nature, the healing and generous gift of open space.
The wordsmith in me is completely enamored of Robert Macfarlane's ode to language and land. The language of place. His desire, by naming all the things, by refusing to lose the myriad ways cultures have sought to identify the natural phenomena that surrounds them, is to "sing the world back into being." No more noble pursuit, with our natural world in such a state of crisis. We need more voices raised in Earth's song. ...more
“… the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is
“… the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?”
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption chronicles the founding, growth, and work of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). EJI is “a private, nonprofit that provides legal representation to indigent defendants and prisoners who have been denied fair and just treatment in the legal system.
We litigate on behalf of condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged with violent crimes, poor people denied effective representation, and others whose trials are marked by racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct. EJI works with communities that have been marginalized by poverty and discouraged by unequal treatment.” (EJI website).
Its Executive Director since the founding of EJI in the late 1980s, Bryan Stevenson wrote Just Mercy to bring readers close to the issues of mass incarceration and the injustices of a broken criminal justice system that condemns children, the mentally ill, non-violent offenders, and wrongly accused to death from life imprisonment or capital punishment.
Just Mercy centers around the case of Walter McMillan, a black man sentenced to death in 1987 for the 1986 murder of Ronda Morrison. Walter was sent to Alabama’s death row before the trial even took place. He would spend six years on death row, before Bryan Stevenson and his team at EJI was able to convince the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals that McMillan had been wrongly convicted. That he was innocent was not in doubt—dozens had tried to testify his whereabouts at the time of the murder; the man who claimed he and McMillan had murdered the young woman recanted his testimony several times; the law enforcement and legal system was blatantly corrupt and racist. But Walter McMillan’s story serves as a representative tale of how the American criminal justice system is still mired in Jim Crow, a massive complex rooted in policies of mass incarceration and structural poverty and racial injustice.
Intertwined with the chapters of Walter McMillan’s story are the cases of men, women, and children around the country that EJI took on, seeking to save lives and reform laws by advocating for the marginalized and broken.
Stevenson posits that there are “four institutions in American history that have shaped our approach to race and justice, but remain poorly understood”: slavery; the reign of terror which followed Reconstruction through WWII, during which African Americans were re-enslaved, lynched, and brutalized; the evolution of Jim Crow, which legalized racial discrimination; and mass incarceration—a deliberate American legal, political, and law enforcement policy, which is chronicled in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Just Mercy is devastating, but as the title suggests, it is not without hope, grace, mercy and compassion, for these are the very qualities that compelled a group of young people, with inadequate funding, staff, and experience, to fight for the most hopeless and forgotten of our society. It is a coming-of-age memoir of a social justice champion.
EJI grew from a staff of two at its founding to more than forty today; Bryan Stevenson is the recipient of multiple honors, including the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" grant, and has tried several cases before the United States Supreme Court; EJI has saved dozens of lives and continues to call for the abolition of the death penalty and draw attention to the ills of a criminal justice system that punishes the poor, people of color, children, and the mentally ill and disabled at rates vastly disproportionate to that of the wealthy and white.
...the opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.
I implore you to read this inspiring, powerful story. It belongs to us all. ...more
Loading...
