A riveting account of the state of Arizona, seen through the lens of the Tucson shootings

On January 8, 2011, twenty-two-year-old Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a Tucson meet-and-greet held by U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. The incident left six people dead and eighteen injured, including Giffords, whom he shot in the head.

Award-winning author and fifth generation Arizonan Tom Zoellner, a longtime friend of Giffords’s and a field organizer on her Congressional campaign, uses the tragedy as a jumping-off point to expose the fault lines in Arizona’s political and socioeconomic landscape that allowed this to happen: the harmful political rhetoric, the inept state government, the lingering effects of the housing market’s boom and bust, the proliferation and accessibility of guns, the lack of established communities, and the hysteria surrounding issues of race and immigration.

Zoellner offers a revealing portrait of the Southwestern state at a critical moment in history- and as a symbol of the nation’s discontents and uncertainties. Ultimately, it is his rallying cry for a saner, more civil way of life.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Tom Zoellner

Tom Zoellner is the author of Uranium:War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, winner of the 2010 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire, and co-author of An Ordinary Man. He has worked as a reporter for The Arizona Republic and San Francisco Chronicle.

Editorial Review

Investigative journalist and native Arizonian Zoellner (Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World, 2009, etc.) combines memoir, history and reportage in an attempt to understand mass murder and the attempted assassination of a friend in Tucson.

The author notes he has truly loved few people in his life, but “Gabrielle had quietly come to be one of them.” In January 2011, U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head outside a Safeway supermarket by Jared Lee Loughner. Six people died, and 18 were injured. Loughner alone was responsible for this carnage, but what was it about Arizona, and perhaps America, that facilitated his schizophrenic rampage? Zoellner finds this context in the fear and hatred that has engulfed Arizona. Always a place for self-reinvention, this was accompanied by a rootlessness culminating in endless tracks of suburban housing where neighbors isolated themselves in air-conditioned solitude. When economic hard times hit the state, isolation turned to unremitting anger. Latinos—though soon to be the majority population of the state—were suspect, and laws were passed to root out the illegals among them. Big government became a chimerical enemy, and hatred of it was fueled by politicians who found that extreme positions brought votes, and by talk radio with its “constant generation of low-grade outrage.” When fellow citizens were viewed as potential predators, carrying a gun became a must, and one could buy guns and ammo as easily as a quart of milk—which is precisely what Loughner did. The gunman wandered alone, ignored or purposefully avoided, until he acted, taking from his environment shards of reality that led to mayhem. Zoellner brilliantly evokes the past and present of Arizona, the outsized personalities that have shaped the state and the paranoia lurking at the edge of society.

A sure-to-be-controversial, troubling tale of the wages of fear on the body politic. – Kirkus Reviews

Book review: ‘A Safeway in Arizona’

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – January 1, 2012 (Excerpt)

The best material in Tom Zoellner’s “A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America” comes at the beginning: a moment-by-moment breakdown of the events of Jan. 8, 2011, when, during a Congress on Your Corner event at a Safeway store in Tucson, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner opened fire with a 9-millimeter Glock, wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and killing six others in a rampage that took “approximately fifteen seconds from start to finish.” These are the facts, and Zoellner, a former reporter at the Arizona Republic and the San Francisco Chronicle, does a good job of setting them out for us, breaking down the chaos and giving it an order, telling us something of the victims, who they were and where they were standing, as well as the small, essential acts of bravery that prevented Loughner, in all likelihood, from causing further harm.

Once this opening is finished, “A Safeway in Arizona” faces some irresolvable problems — problems of construction and,even more, of interpretation and form. In writing about the Giffords shooting, Zoellner has taken on a story that is, for now anyway, open-ended, full of unanswered questions about the congresswoman’s recovery and the fate of her assailant, who has yet to go on trial. How, then, do we get to the center of it, when the center has yet to be determined? What gives this the coherence of a book? As it turns out, such issues ultimately derail Zoellner’s efforts, which, of necessity perhaps, quickly turn outward, considering the culture of Arizona and asking whether the state’s “peculiar oxygen [was] in some way responsible for the decision of a twenty-two-year-old man to go down to the grocery to assassinate his congresswoman?” Zoellner’s answer? Yes and no, which makes for another set of problems, since it leaves us never completely sure of where he stands. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Yes, there are slight differences between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America, and being a German, living in New England for more than twenty years and soon applying for American citizenship, I have, on occasion, to explain to either side what the other one is about.

Now, that I prepare for my next trip back to “umbrella land” (it rains a lot more in Germany than in New England), I am preparing myself to explain recent events, namely the snowy 2011 Halloween weekend that left millions of Americans without power, including yours truly. See also my post My Adventure Trip: Delivering Snow From New York to Western Massachusetts.

As a result of the severe weather conditions, we were without electrical power for two days, a concept unknown and incomprehensible to my fellow Germans.

A friend from England, author Peter Carroll, expressed his confusion about what he read of the current conditions over here. “Hope you are reconnected after the severe weather in your area. We have been seeing the pictures online,” he wrote in an email. “Amazing with the US – usually so advanced in technology – how you still have overhead electricity cables;  what with the threat of hurricanes and all!”

I explained to him the history behind this circumstance, and it all has to to with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his economic program titled “The New Deal.” In order to fight the Great Depression in the 1930s, he ordered, among many other economic programs, that every household should be supplied with electricity. And they did it within shortest time. And they used the material that was available in abundance: Wood. That is the reason why the vast majority of houses and buildings in the USA are build with wood. Also, American railways use more wood and less iron than European railways.

Unfortunately, the technology of delivering electricity has not changed in 80+ years. These days, these wooden posts also carry telephone lines and cables for the digital world (Internet, cable TV).

And yes, this is only one minute detail of life in America. So how do you explain Germany to an American? I have heard questions like “Do you have running water in Germany?” and I answer, “Yes. It runs down the walls.” Then I explain how I, when I was a teenager dressed in lederhosens, was sent out into the forest to hunt for a boar or two for supper.

And it works both ways… Someone in Germany asked if I understood English, and when I nodded yes, he replied, “That’s a good thing. At least you can watch TV over there.” Yeah, like there is nothing else I can do over here.

Anyway, the best way to explain Germany to Americans is, first of all, the size. In coarse terms, the reunited Germany is roughly the size of Montana. Now squeeze roughly one third of the entire American population (~82 million people in Germany) into the size of Montana, a state with a current population of 990,000. That’s a factor (where’s my calculator?) … 83. It’s like you’re driving through Cleveland. You continue driving the next day, and you’re still in Cleveland. Another day, and you’re still in Cleveland. You get the picture.

There are, naturally, some side effects stemming not only from this kind of population density, but also from the long history. Germans are very protective of their privacy. That includes, for instance, shyness when it comes to being photographed. Also, and here lies the major difference between Germany and the US, the community’s well-being ALWAYS takes precedence over the individual, while the individual rights are much more emphasized here in the United States. In my personal opinion, that is the most appealing feature of American life.

Talking about history… My upcoming trip to Germany will bring me (and my American wife, American son) to Hannover, a city in the northern part of Germany. Due to the family connection between the European monarchies, some English kings came from Hannover. Hannover has an old town hall and a new town hall, where the new town hall is a mere 700 years old.

My home town, the much smaller town of Mettmann near Duesseldorf, was first mentioned in an official document in the year 805 A.D.

Talking about my old home town … Would you believe me when I told you there is a Radio Neanderthal? No? And yet, it’s true.

First, I have to explain the term Neanderthal. According to Wikipedia:

Joachim Neander (Neumann) (1650 – 31 May 1680) was a German Reformed (Calvinist) Church teacher, theologian and hymn writer whose most famous hymn, Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation is generally regarded as one of the greatest hymns of praise of the Christian church and, since being translated into English by Catherine Winkworth in the 19th century, it has appeared in most major hymnals.

In 1674 he became a teacher in a Latin school in Düsseldorf, one step before becoming a minister. While living there, he liked to go to the nearby valley of the Düssel river, nature being the inspiration for his poems. He also held gatherings and services in the valley, at which he gave sermons. The valley (German thal modernized to tal) was renamed in his honor in the early 19th century, and became famous in 1856 when the remains of the Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal Man) were found there.

My home town of Mettmann is near the Neander Valley (Neanderthal), and a local radio station calls itself “Radio Neanderthal.”

All in all, there are many little details about life in both countries, and there is not enough time and space to document them all, but it makes my life so more interesting.

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Each naturalized citizen had their individual dream of a Utopian dimension, a dream about their future life in the United States. Some call it the American dream.

This article is one in a series about My Fellow Utopians. 

Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington - Copyright by David Shankbone

Arianna Huffington (born Arianna Stasinopoulos; July 15, 1950) is a Greek American author and syndicated columnist. She is best known as co-founder of the news website The Huffington Post. A popular conservative commentator in the mid-1990s, she adopted more liberal political beliefs in the late 1990s. She is the ex-wife of former Republican congressman Michael Huffington.

In 2003, she ran as an independent candidate for Governor in the California recall election.

In 2009, Huffington was named as number 12 in Forbes‘ first-ever list of the Most Influential Women In Media. She has also moved up to number 42 in The Guardian‘s Top 100 in Media List.

On February 7, 2011, AOL announced it would acquire The Huffington Post for US$315 million and make Huffington president and editor in chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include The Huffington Post and existing AOL properties such as Engadget, AOL Music, Patch Media, and StyleList.

Arianna’s story is unusual only because she is famous. Otherwise, she is very much the story of the American dream: a highly intelligent, determined person decides that she wants to make the best of her life. She looks around the world, as did the Pilgrims and tens of millions of Western and Eastern Europeans (and many others) over a period of four hundred years, and she sees promise in America. This nation of unlimited social mobility wins again. – Rick Jacobs in The Huffington Post

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Julie Otsuka’s long awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine (“To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels likeLord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird” —The New York Times) is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as ‘picture brides’ nearly a century ago.

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.

In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“With her gift for compression and her feel for a child’s-eye view of disrupted family life, Otsuka neatly sidesteps any checklist predictability as she covers her ground. . . . While you’re reading this accomplished novel, what impresses you most is how much Otsuka is able to convey—in a line, in a paragraph—about her characters’ surroundings, about their states of mind and about the mood of our country at a time of crisis.” —Michael Upchurch, The New York Times Book Review

“An exceptional short novel. . . . A story that is elegiac and representative. . . . When the Emperor Was Divine carves out its own special place in style and substance. The book is shaped like a parable: Short, unadorned sentences say less while signifying more. . . . Stunning economy. . . . An exceptional piece of fiction.” —Ellen Emry Heltzel, The Chicago Tribune

“Her voice never falters, equally adept at capturing horrific necessity and accidental beauty. Her unsung prisoners of war contend with multiple front lines, and enemies who wear the faces of neighbors and friends. It only takes a few pages to join their cause, but by the time you finish this exceptional debut, you will recognize that their struggle has always been yours.” —Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days

Coming to America, Lured by a Photo

The New York Times Book Review – August 26, 2011 (Excerpt)

In the Japanese art of sumi-e, strokes of ink are brushed across sheets of rice paper, the play of light and dark capturing not just images but sensations, not just surfaces but the essence of what lies within. Simplicity of line is prized, extraneous detail discouraged. Although Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California and trained as a painter in the Western tradition, she seems perfectly attuned to the spirit of sumi-e. Otsuka claims to have been a failure as an artist, but she might only have erred in choosing the wrong medium. Proof arrived almost a decade ago, long after she’d traded painting for writing, with the publication of her first novel, “When the Emperor Was Divine,” a spare but resonant portrait of one Japanese-­American family’s daily life, at home and in the internment camps, during World War II. Now she returns with a second novel, also employing a minimalist technique, that manages to be equally intimate yet much more expansive.

Like its predecessor, “The Buddha in the Attic” unfurls as a sequence of linked narratives, some no longer than a paragraph. While it appears to hold the characters at a formal distance, that reticence infuses their stories with powerful emotion. The central figures in Otsuka’s first book, a mother and her children identified merely as “the boy,” “the girl” and “the woman,” were followed from their home in Berkeley to a barracks in the high Utah desert, then back again. As the string of vignettes proceeded, the questions they asked, the observations they made, the illusions they cherished created a bond with the reader. With their sometimes uncomfortably familiar hopes and fears, Otsuka’s characters emerged as particular individuals even as their concerns took us far beyond the particulars of the Japanese-­American experience. In these nameless people, we confronted our own uncertainties about where we truly belong, where our loyalties lie, where we should place our trust.

There are plenty of names in Otsuka’s new novel, but this time the cast is composed of an entire community of families. The voice that speaks to us here is the “we” of the Japanese women who arrived in California in the aftermath of World War I, most of them young and inexperienced, most bearing photographs of men they had agreed to marry, sight unseen: “On the boat we could not have known that when we first saw our husbands we would have no idea who they were. That the crowd of men in knit caps and shabby black coats waiting for us down below on the dock would bear no resemblance to the handsome young men in the photographs. That the photographs we had been sent were 20 years old. . . . That when we first heard our names being called out across the water one of us would cover her eyes and turn away — I want to go home — but the rest of us would lower our heads and smooth down the skirts of our kimonos and walk down the gangplank and step out into the still warm day. This is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry. And we would be wrong.” [Read the full article...]

Julie Otsuka’s ‘The Buddha in the Attic,’ reviewed by Ron Charles

The Washington Post Book Review – November 16, 2011 (Excerpt)

A year after the attacks of Sept. 11, Julie Otsuka published her spare first novel about a family of Japanese Americans consigned to an internment camp in Utah. “When the Emperor Was Divine” hit a lot of notes just right in our newly paranoid country: Its lyrical style, emotional poignancy and historical content appealed to book clubs; its brevity, chastity and diversity appealed to schools. While splashy books like “Lovely Bones,” “Middlesex” and “Life of Pi” soaked up attention, Otsuka’s quiet debut lay the foundations for paperback immortal­ity.

Her follow-up novel, a kind of prequel that’s just as slim, starts off with a louder critical boost: It’s one of the five finalists for the National Book Award in fiction to be handed out Wednesday. Every year the shortlist makes an easy target for complaints: The finalists are too commercial, too obscure, too not the books I happened to like. Otsuka’s “The Buddha in the Attic” can’t be dismissed on any of those grounds, but the National Book Award judges have burdened this delicate novel with expectations it can’t comfortably carry. [Read the full article...]

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

They say there was or there wasn’t in olden times a story as old as life, as young as this moment, a story that is yours and is mine.

Once in a Promised Land is the story of Jassim and Salwa, who left the deserts of their native Jordan for those of Arizona, each chasing mirages of opportunity and freedom. Although the couple live far from Ground Zero, they cannot escape the dust cloud of paranoia settling over the nation.

A hydrologist, Jassim believes passionately in his mission to make water accessible to all people, but his work is threatened by an FBI witch hunt for domestic terrorists. A Palestinian now twice displaced, Salwa embraces the American dream. She grapples to put down roots in an unwelcoming climate, becoming pregnant against her husband’s wishes.

When Jassim kills a teenage boy in a terrible accident and Salwa becomes hopelessly entangled with a shadowy young American, their tenuous lives in exile and their fragile marriage begin to unravel. Once in a Promised Land is a dramatic and achingly honest look at what it means to straddle cultures, to be viewed with suspicion, and to struggle to find safe haven.

Editorial Reviews

In this trial of post-9/11 America, a Jordanian couple enjoys the spoils of freedom until fate curdles their dreams. Living in Tucson, Ariz., husband Jassim is a hydrologist with an immigrant’s-eye view of the States as a place of “stainless steel promises… and possibility.” His wife, Salwa, also believes in a country where anything from “a house in the foothills to sex with a co-worker” could be yours. But after the “crazy suicide” that destroys the Twin Towers, their idyllic lives are torpedoed; paranoid bigotry, patriotism run amok and a baseless FBI investigation are only the beginning. Compounding the suspicion, Jassim is involved in a fatal car accident and Salwa—haunted by a miscarriage and confused by the affections of another man—sends large amounts of money back home. Halaby (West of the Jordan) uses this second novel to zero in on clashing cultures and lob rhetorical Molotov cocktails against the land of “antennas to God.” Her prose crackles, but at the expense of her characters, whose inner lives are unconvincing even as their circumstances are awfully real. – Publishers Weekly

Halaby’s timely second novel details the painful crumbling of a marriage mired in prejudice, cultural displacement, and deceit in the days following 9/11. Jassim Haddad and his wife, Salwa, have come to Tucson from Jordan so Jassim can pursue his career as a hydrologist. Questions regarding their cultural and religious background are at first subtle, then gradually more blatant, culminating in a complaint from a colleague of Jassim’s to the local office of the FBI. His “suspicious behavior,” however, is a result of the overwhelming guilt he feels after his car accidentally hits and kills a skateboarder. Jassim is exonerated, but he doesn’t tell Salwa about the boy’s death, just plods on, “as if he had wandered into someone else’s life.” Salwa, too, has been drifting away from Jassim, first hiding from him her miscarriage, then engaging in an affair with a coworker. Halaby perceptively examines the everyday realities of the immigrant experience through convincingly drawn characters who reflect Salwa’s deep-seated belief that in America, “wishes don’t come true for Arabs.” - Deborah Donovan, Booklist

Review

Immediately after 9/11 a young Arab couple living in a comfortable but lackluster marriage in Tucson, Arizona, must confront personal tragedies in the midst of America’s rising anger and bigotry for all things Middle Eastern.

Salwa Haddad resents her husband Jassim’s stoic response to prejudice from Americans. For Jassim, a scientist who doesn’t believe in religion, he’s simply bewildered how anyone could associate him with Islamic fanaticism. On his part, he sees Salwa’s excessive shopping habits as a shoddy form of coping mechanism. After Salwa has a miscarriage of the pregnancy she was keeping secret from her husband, and Jassim accidentally runs over and kills a teenaged skateboarder, things quickly fall apart because of their self-involvement and inability to communicate with each other. As each turn to others in their separate professional and social circles, the results are secrets, lies and further tragedy.

Salwa finds in her younger American coworker, the handsome but deceptive Jake, the attention and passion she is unable to get from Jassim. Jassim, trying to cope with the guilt and shame over taking someone’s life, is at the same time dealing with sudden hostility and suspicions from his co-workers and the scrutiny of the FBI as well. Losing those few friends he had, Jassim realizes Salwa is emotionally unable to be there for him; so instead Jassim finds an outlet in Penny, a 30something waitress with her own emotional scars.

Laila Halaby is an extraordinary storyteller, who artfully builds the Haddads’ world from inside-out, while several subplots flow easily into the over-arching setting. Like the people we know in real life, her characters can be endearing and irritating. Initially I was attracted to Salwa’s character, finding Jassim cold. However, halfway into the story, I found Jassim becoming the more interesting of the two, with integrity and a conscience surpassing his wife’s.

Halaby also seems to enjoy playing with readers’ emotions. She dispenses with Middle Eastern stereotypes, while using the ones for Americans as a snare. Just as you think you’ve pigeonholed the author and her book, subtle plot twists lead to developments proving you wrong. ONCE IN A PROMISED LAND is a novel which goes far to capture the complexities and inconsistencies between individuals and their various identities and the roles and responsibilities they entail. I am looking forward to more from this woman in the future. – Caesar M. Warrington, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

By the end of World War II, Silvana is a ghost of the wife Janusz once had. She and their 7-year-old son Aurek travel from Poland to England to reunite their family–a family that has been separated for 6 years. That’s where 22 Britannia Road, Amanda Hodgkinson’s stunning debut novel, begins. As the past unfolds from multiple points of view, it becomes clear that despite their determination to make a fresh start, the hidden secrets of the past threaten to destroy Silvana and Janusz’s dreams of becoming a family once again. The irreversible events that passed during their years of separation still linger, including the horrors of war, Janusz’s betrayal by a love affair with another woman, and the devastating secret that Silvana will do anything to conceal. Hodgkinson’s poetic voice is impossible to forget, and the shocking and hopeful ending of her remarkable historical novel will leave readers reeling–and satisfied. –Miriam Landis, Amazon.Com Review

In her powerful debut, Hodgkinson takes on the tale of a family desperately trying to put itself back together after WWII. Silvana and Janusz have only been married a few months when the war forces them apart. Silvana and their infant son, Aurek, leave Poland and disappear into the forests of Eastern Europe, where they bear witness to German atrocities. Meanwhile Janusz, the sole survivor of his slaughtered military unit, flees to France. There, he takes up with a local girl and, though he loves her, awaits the war’s end so that he can go in search of his wife and son. He eventually finds them in a refugee camp and they travel to England together, where they attempt to put the past behind them. But the secrets they carry pull at the threads of their fragile peace. Hodgkinson alternates viewpoints to relay the story of three desperate characters, skillfully toggling between the war and its aftermath with wonderfully descriptive prose that pulls the reader into a sweeping tale of survival and redemption. – Publishers Weekly

Author Q&A with Amanda Hodgkinson

Source: Amazon.Com

Q: What drew you to this particular story of Polish World War II survivors living in England?

A: As a child, I was always fascinated when the adults around me talked about World War II. These were older family members who had lived through it and I would try to stay quiet so I could listen without being discovered. Their voices changed to lower registers, there were weighted silences in the conversations, sad looks, secretive whispering and then somebody would notice me and send me out to play, their voice swinging up a register to convey a gaiety they probably didn’t feel. I would go to bed at night, sick at heart thinking about these stories, and wonder how the world ever managed to get back to the normal after that war.

Looking back, I think I never stopped wondering. Years later, I was standing in my kitchen and heard a Russian woman on the radio, describing her experiences of being a child during the war. “We were so hungry,” she said, “we ate the bark of the silver birch trees.” An image came to me, so clear and strong, it was more like a memory than an act of my imagination. I wrote down what I saw; a young woman in a silver birch forest. I had begun to write my novel.

Q: From Silvana’s exile in the forest to the petrol rations in post-war Ipswich, you paint a vivid picture of the novel’s historical settings and events. What sort of research did you do to get the details right?

A: I balanced my own imaginative input with research. I read social history books on the war and the postwar period, including a lot of oral histories on Polish immigrant experiences. I also read wonderful Polish poets like Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rózewicz, among others. I studied Polish fairytales and classic Polish literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I discovered tango music had been very popular in Poland during the thirties, so I listened to some fabulous clips on YouTube and imagined myself there, in the 1930s, dancing at a club in Warsaw, just like Hanka, one of the characters in the book tells Silvana about. I immersed myself in books, music and literature and then I put aside all research and let my imagination go to work. Whenever I was unsure about a scene, I turned to my own thoughts and feelings, relying on my ability to imagine a moment and on my empathy for the characters, rather than history books, and I think this approach helped me really understand my characters and the time.

Q: What does the title, the address of the home Janusz chooses for his reunited family, represent to you symbolically? Why that particular address?

A: I wanted a very ordinary address. A typical English home. You can find a Britannia Road in most English towns and there is no mistaking the pronounced sense of place in this address. Janusz wants what the address offers. A new life and a new country. Ironically, this address, with its connotations of national identity and pride, also serves to highlight the sense of displacement Janusz, Silvana and Aurek, as an immigrant family, must have felt in a small town in Britain. Another reason I used an address was to show how important home was to the characters. For me, the novel is about finding a home, physically, psychologically and metaphorically. Home is a small word that holds within itself complex meanings. Change one letter and you have the word hope. And Janusz, Silvana and Aurek hope to make a home together.

Q: A powerful theme in this book is the pain of survival—even Janusz, who had a relatively easy escape from Poland, suffers from having outlived Hélène and other loved ones. What personal discoveries did you make about this theme while writing the book?

A: Writing the book and researching it made me very aware of how people are still suffering under wars. The mass movement of displaced people around the world continues and the number of children who are orphaned and families disrupted and broken by war does not diminish.

Q: You do an exceptional job capturing the psyche of young Aurek, who has clearly been traumatized by his experiences. Did you draw from case studies of children with similar experiences, or did you find your way to this character instinctually?

A: I wrote Aurek very instinctively. I felt I knew the boy from the moment I first wrote a small, tentative description of him, crouching in the back garden at 22 Britannia Road. I read Through The Eyes of the Innocents: Children Witness World War II by Emmy E Werner, which conveys the heartbreaking experiences of children, and that fed my own understanding of what Aurek might have been through but really, when I was writing Aurek, I found I could connect with him best on an emotional level. So I wrote what he felt. I tried to go beyond language with him and bring out his primitive sense of survival, his desire to feel loved and his need to love others.

Review

This is the story of a Polish couple, Silvana and Janusz and their son Aurek. They met and married in 1937. As both the Russians and the Germans invaded Poland in 1940 the couple is separated. He joins the military and after a long journey, typical of Poles who chose to fight on after the defeat of their country, ends up in the RAF in England. She initially raped by a German soldier, flees with their son to a live in the forests of Poland. The story opens in 1946 as the couple is reunited after their six year separation. Building on the memories of a deeply loving relationship before the war the couple tries to reestablish their family life. Each has secrets that they do not share with thevother. These secrets, the crux of the story, are slowly revealed in two separate threads. No more spoilers from me on the story!

This book is vividly written and has complexity to the plot that continues to draw you in right up until the last chapter. The long lasting effects of war on people are brilliantly portrayed in the story. In post war Britain, the couple has every advantage- an intact family, a house, a car, a good job – but the lingering effects of what happened to them during the war destroy their chances to go forward. The son has been deeply influenced by his time in the forests avoiding both Germans and Russians and living off the land. In one scene his father shows him how to collect and save birds eggs and the boy can only think of how he wants to eat the eggs contents as he did so often in the forests. He has a particularly difficult time socializing and entering into normal relationships. It was heartbreaking and at times almost too sad to bear. In the end though this story is a triumph of the human spirit over adversity. – Philly Gal, Amazon.Com Customer Review

After the Holocaust

The New York Times Book Review – June 3, 2011 (Excerpt)

For Silvana, the Polish Holocaust survivor at the center of Amanda Hodgkinson’s accomplished first novel, “22 Britannia Road,” maternal love is a heart-scorching, perilous emotion. During the war, threats to the life of Aurek, her young son, were everywhere: from the “filthy” skies, raked with thunder clouds and German planes, to the sunless, brambly depths of the Polish forests, where she and Aurek, like two figures in a fairy tale, hid out for years. They are rescued from a refugee camp by Janusz, the husband and father from whom they were separated at the beginning of the fighting. Janusz brings them to Ipswich, to the small house and garden that give the novel its title. There Silvana forces herself to believe that a normal life is possible: that she and Janusz will rediscover themselves as husband and wife, that Aurek will have a father — and that the secret still threatening her son’s security will stay buried.

Starting over is far from easy. Silvana, baffled by English customs, spends her days “wandering through the rooms in a daze.” Janusz must teach mother and son “not to take a bath in their clothes, . . . not to steal vegetables from the allotments by the river.” Aurek hates school and misses the forest, where he learned to sing out like a bird.

Moving between Janusz’s and Silvana’s (and occasionally Aurek’s) points of view, Hodgkinson links each to flashbacks from the war. While these are often riveting, the back and forth saps the novel of momentum, and at times the structure feels rigid. Yet Hodgkinson compensates with luminous prose and with her intense exploration of how the past, no matter how horrific, no matter how much we wish to forget it, lodges deep in our innermost selves. [Read the full article...]

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Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Almost Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

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Vaclav and Lena seem destined for each other. They meet as children in an ESL class in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Vaclav is precocious and verbal. Lena, struggling with English, takes comfort in the safety of his adoration, his noisy, loving home, and the care of Rasia, his big-hearted mother. Vaclav imagines their story unfolding like a fairy tale, or the perfect illusion from his treasured Magician’s Almanac, but among the many truths to be discovered in Haley Tanner’s wondrous debut is that happily ever after is never a foregone conclusion.

One day, Lena does not show up for school. She has disappeared from Vaclav and his family’s lives as if by a cruel magic trick. For the next seven years, Vaclav says goodnight to Lena without fail, wondering if she is doing the same somewhere. On the eve of Lena’s seventeenth birthday he finds out.

Haley Tanner has the originality and verve of a born storyteller, and the boldness to imagine a world in which love can overcome the most difficult circumstances. In Vaclav & Lena she has created two unforgettable young protagonists who evoke the joy, the confusion, and the passion of having a profound, everlasting connection with someone else.

Editorial Reviews

“In this charming and wonderfully engaging tale, the reader is swept into the beautifully rendered landscape of the immigrant childhood experience. Haley Tanner has created a world peopled with characters of great poignancy, and they will linger in the mind—and heart—long after the book is put down.”—Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge

“There are books you enjoy, and then there are books you live in. Haley Tanner plunges you into the Russian émigré community in Brooklyn, where two souls connect under a maternal watchful eye. Tanner’s assured narrative voice finds new ways to describe emotion and character, bringing the reader up short again and again with small shocks of awareness. This book is sad, funny, true, and shot through with grace.”—Judy Blundell, National Book Award–winning author of What I Saw and How I Lied

“Vaclav & Lena is a wonderful achievement, generous, playful, moving, and refreshing. It was the voice that first captivated me here, a voice that allows Haley Tanner to say anything at all, and to say it truly. Give this novel a few short pages, and I guarantee you’ll want to read it to the end.”—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The View from the Seventh Layer and The Brief History of the Dead

“A terrific,  enlightened debut.”—Kirkus Reviews

Review

I received this book as an ARC through Shelf Awareness. I immediately wanted to read it, because it sounded like such a sweet story, but it goes a lot deeper than just a romance between two people. Vaclav and Lena were first forced together when they were young, neither one really having any friends. Their imperfect English held them back from fully connecting with the American kids they went to school with. However, when they were together, they knew that the other would accept them unconditionally. It was easy to how much Vaclav adored Lena and that he would do anything for her. It was obvious that Lena cared for Vaclav as well, but her shocking and appalling home life made her extremely introverted; it was as if she had a wall up, even around her best friend, Vaclav. I could sense that there was something darker going on in Lena’s home life that wasn’t coming to light at the beginning, something more awful than just being left to fend for herself all of the time. My heart broke when Lena disappeared from Vaclav’s life. She was his world, his sun and she was simply ripped away from him. No goodbyes, no finality. Just left to wonder if he would ever see her again.

The first part of the book went between telling the story from Vaclav and Lena’s perspectives. I liked that, as it was nice to get a glimpse into what both of them were going through (although like I said, Lena remained somewhat of a mystery). The middle of the book takes place 7 years later and it is split up into two parts: Lena’s story and Vaclav’s story. This gives a lot more insight into Lena’s life, especially in the time when she was very young, before she even met Vaclav. I think the sweetest thing is that even after all of that time, Vaclav still said goodnight to Lena, every single night. He was afraid that if he stopped doing so something bad would happen to her. Even after all of the time they spent apart, she was still the last thing he thought about before he went to bed.

Each section of the book is split up into little chapters. I liked the cute, descriptive chapter names (you’ll see what I mean when you read it!) and I loved how short the chapters were. They were each like little stories all in their own. The last part of the book reveals a lot of answers I had been waiting for the whole time and that is why I’m not going to go into too much more detail about the book.

I do want to share one of my favorite quotes from the book (however, keep in mind that I read the ARC, so things might be different in the finished copy):

“Vaclav had already known that she was sitting there before he even saw her. He had felt her looking at him, He had known it was her, had to be her, because he felt, suddenly, the compulsion to turn and look at that bench, to look in her direction, like there were magnets in his eyes and she was a supermagnetized hunk of some other planet, just fallen to earth.”

This was a wonderful book, showing how love can withstand space and time. It also shows how childhood can shape a person, for better or worse. I definitely recommend giving this book a chance; it’s a fairly quick read, especially since I couldn’t put it down, and it was impossible not to feel for the characters and fall in love with them. - Jamie, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Young Russians in Brooklyn Find Love, the Wonder Wheel and Then Life

The New York Times Book Review – May 30, 2011 (Excerpt)

There comes a point in almost every relationship when you discuss the future. Where is this heading? Do you want to get married? Doyou want to get married? Vaclav and Lena have had this talk. It has gone well. Vaclav and Lena are 10.

In Haley Tanner’s wonderful and wrenching debut novel, “Vaclav & Lena,” the title characters are Russian immigrants who meet at age 6 in an English as a Second Language class at their Brooklyn school, “with all the other kids who have stinky lunches.” Since then their relationship has progressed. It is now defined as magician and assistant. They practice their act every day after school in Vaclav’s bedroom, writing lists of plans and supplies on notebook paper, then folding and sealing them with candle wax. They make promises to each other regarding one kind of magic: They will perform on the Coney Island boardwalk as Vaclav the Magnificent and his assistant, the Lovely Lena. And another: They will be together forever.

Whimsical love stories are tough to pull off. But as in the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” vibrant characters, believable romance and dark undertones make for a moving tale. The book’s contrast between childhood fantasy and the grim world outside tamps down the cutesiness. It helps that Ms. Tanner is such a strong storyteller, and her distinctive voice — winsome without being dopey — engulfs you immediately. [Read the full article...]

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From 1941 to 1947, eighteen thousand Italian prisoners of war were sent to Australia. The Italian surrender that followed the downfall of Mussolini had created a novel circumstance: prisoners who theoretically were no longer enemies. Many of these exiles were sent to work on isolated farms, unguarded.

The Paperbark Shoe is the unforgettable story of Gin Boyle—an albino, a classically trained pianist, and a woman with a painful past. Disavowed by her wealthy stepfather, her unlikely savior is the farmer Mr. Toad—a little man with a taste for women’s corsets. Together with their two children, they weather the hardship of rural life and the mockery of their neighbors. But with the arrival of two Italian prisoners of war, their lives are turned upside down. Thousands of miles from home, Antonio and John find themselves on Mr. and Mrs. Toad’s farm, exiles in the company of exiles. The Paperbark Shoe is a remarkable novel about the far-reaching repercussions of war, the subtle violence of displacement, and what it means to live as a captive—in enemy country, and in one’s own skin.

Editorial Reviews

Review

At one point in this very worthwhile debut novel, one of the book’s delightfully three-dimensional characters observes that “the shoemaker’s family goes barefoot,” and this is as close as I have been able to come to a a unifying principle for the book.

I won’t go into details about the “plot” of the book, both because other reviewers have already covered that territory and because in my view the plot is perhaps the least important of the many things that make this book so good.

One of those things is that Goldbloom succeeds in putting us inside the head of her main character. I’m not really sure how she has managed to do this, but I think it has something to do with…honesty? Vulnerability? Self-revelation? The tale’s narrator is not an entirely sympathetic character (to be diplomatic about it), though she comes by her foibles honestly. An upbringing juxtaposing material comfort with a scarcity of love and acceptance has left Gin Boyle jaded, perhaps somewhat bitter, and certainly possessed of a caustically acerbic wit. This too makes for delightful reading and no doubt exerts some of the seemingly magnetic pull of the book. I found myself progressively drawn into the small world of Wyalketcham, Australia, until by the last 20 or 30 pages of the book I could not wait to get back to it each time I had put it down.

Goldbloom is a talented writer, and although I wouldn’t quite characterize her writing as lyrical–there’s really very little lyricism in this gritty tale–she certainly understands rhythm and cadence and weaves a marvelous spell. The book is also broken up into chapters, and longer chapters are broken into sections, making this an especially user-friendly book for busy readers on the go.

The real strength of the book is that the characters are all flawed enough, quirky enough, interesting enough in and of themselves–and the interpersonal and social politics Goldbloom explores are at once strange, new, and yet familiar enough–to be broadly appealing and utterly compelling. How else to explain my inability to put down a book about characters in a time and place to which I really wouldn’t expect to feel drawn?

So why not 5 stars? I have two minor quibbles: first, I found the ending unsatisfying. Not to say that I could do any better, but still… The other issue was what I felt to be a false note in the dialogue. At one point an Italian prisoner of war, who was raised in a small rural village and worked as a shoemaker, tells a story around the campfire, but for all intents and purposes his “voice” was indistinguishable from the well-educated, culturally refined, native English-speaking main character. Really the one part of the book I could not buy into.

Overall, highly recommended. – Jacques Talbot, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

Now Available As Paperback And Kindle Edition!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Immigration makes America what it is and is formative for what it will become. America was settled by three different models of immigration, all of which persist to the present. The Virginia Colony largely equated immigration with the arrival of laborers, who had few rights. Massachusetts welcomed those who shared the religious views of the founders but excluded those whose beliefs challenged the prevailing orthodoxy. Pennsylvania valued pluralism, becoming the most diverse colony in religion, language, and culture. This book traces the evolution of these three competing models of immigration as they explain the historical roots of current policy debates and options. Arguing that the Pennsylvania model has best served the country, the final chapter makes recommendations for future immigration reform. Given the highly controversial nature of immigration in the United States, this book provides thoughtful, well-reasoned analysis, valuable to both academic and policy audiences for the ways it places today’s trends and policy options into historical perspective.

Editorial Reviews

“In this important and compelling study, Susan Martin provides a fresh historical perspective for understanding immigration and its governance in the United States. A Nation of Immigrants demonstrates the persistence of three distinctive models of immigration dating back to the colonial era, revealing the full range of constructive and detrimental legacies that these traditions have yielded over time. In contrast to most previous works, this book also teaches us a great deal about the significant interplay between the immigration policies adopted by officials and the grassroots experiences of immigrants and refugees. In an impressive merging of careful scholarship and rich personal experience in the policy process, Martin gives new meaning to our immigrant past and offers thoughtful recommendations for our way forward on this irrepressibly contentious issue.”
-Daniel J. Tichenor, University of Oregon

“It is a truism to say that America is a nation of immigrants. But in this brilliant work Susan Martin shows us how the United States truly was shaped by immigration from colonial times to the present. A magisterial work of political and social history, this book is perfectly timed and will be read by generations to come.”
-James Hollifield, Southern Methodist University

“US immigration policy debates obviously are increasingly passionate and stalemated. Alas they also are ill-informed by history. Susan Martin’s book seeks to ‘provide a thoughtful, well-reasoned analysis…by placing today’s trends and policy options into historical perspective.’ This is a great success – a cool breeze of reason and fact to temper the emotions that prevail. Whether or not they agree with Martin’s views, those who actually want to understand the convoluted history, bizarre politics and embarrassing contradictions of US immigration policy should read this book.”
-Michael Teitelbaum, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

“Susan Martin uniquely combines scholarly dedication and policy experience. In this book, she has brought both to bear on the resolution of a quandary I cannot state better than she does herself: ‘It is a truism that the United States is a nation of immigrants. . . The phrase, however, hides as much as it illuminates.’ She elegantly resolves the quandary by analyzing successive phases of US immigration in terms of three initial models: Virginia, Pennsylvania, ands Massachusetts.”
-Aristide Zolberg, The New School for Social Research

“A Nation of Immigrants is an exemplary synthesis and interpretive history of its urgent subject. It is also a deeply considered and thought-provoking book.” -TNR.com

Favoring Immigration if Not the Immigrant

The New York Times Book Review – May 8, 2011 (Excerpt)

WASHINGTON — So deeply has the phrase “a nation of immigrants” seeped into the American psyche that millions of people reflexively use it while few know who coined the phrase. (It was Senator John F. Kennedy, in a 1958 book by that name.)

usan F. Martin, a historian at Georgetown University, embraces the term even as she warns that it hides more than it reveals. Her book — titled, yes, “A Nation of Immigrants” — argues that the United States historically has favored immigration more consistently than it has immigrants.

Three competing models evolved in the original colonies, she writes, each with a different vision of what purposes newcomers would serve. Elements of each have persisted since.

Virginia sought workers but found them in slaves.

Massachusetts sought believers but punished dissent.

Pennsylvania sought citizens, and built them from foreign stock (despite gripes from residents as cosmopolitan as Benjamin Franklin).

Each model was pro-immigration, Ms. Martin argues, but not necessarily pro-immigrant.

“They had very different ideas about what would happen after the immigrant entered the country,” she said in an interview. [Read the full article...]

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In her U.S. debut, Nigerian immigrant Unigwe sets a melancholy tale in her adopted home of Belgium. When “Sisi” receives an offer from a questionable businessman to work in Belgium she accepts, agreeing to repay expenses as she works. She leaves the depressed, jobless Lagos only to find herself employed as a prostitute on Antwerp’s Zwartezusterstraat (literally “Black Sisters Street”) along with fellow Africans Ama, Joyce, and Efe. Despite her dire circumstance, Sisi falls in love with a native Belgian who encourages her to break free from her madam and the Lagos businessman.

Freedom, however, remains elusive for Sisi, whose pitiful life is cut short with the swing of a hammer, prompting her Zwartezusterstraat sisters to share their own stories of fear, abuse, and violence, and allowing Unigwe to give powerful voice to women of the African Diaspora who are forced to use sex to survive. The author’s raw voice, unflinching eye for detail, facility for creating a complex narrative, and affection for her characters make this a must read. – Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

“Powerful….The author’s raw voice, unflinching eye for detail, facility for creating a complex narrative, and affection for her characters make this a must read.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Gripping….As Unigwe tells her characters’ stories in interweaving narratives and time lines, the women embody depths of fear and displacement, as well as the will to survive and prosper.”
–Booklist

“A novel of desperation, sexual exploitation, and, ultimately, sisterhood. … Unigwe has a talent for capturing the dashed dreams of young women who are stronger than they imagine. … The women’s personal stories are wrenchingly memorable.”
—Library Journal

“In her English-language debut, the Nigerian-born Unigwe convincingly exposes an unfamiliar world without sentimentality. Capable drama that puts a human face on the scourge of human trafficking.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Spellbinding…combines a storyteller’s narrative flair with a reporter’s eye for grim, gritty details about the sex industry. … Nigerian-born Unigwe crafts her characters’ voices with crystalline prose and compassion, in a revelatory work as tough, humane and unsentimental as its heroines.”
—MORE Magazine

“Powerfully and gently, Unigwe gives voice to African women who walk the streets of their nightmares and dreams.”
–Sefi Atta, author of Everything Good Will Come

“Chika Unigwe brings an ethnographic eye and masterful storytelling to bear on this complex portrait of African sex workers in Antwerp.  Her startlingly physical prose offers a fresh look at lives made and unmade between Europe and Africa.”
–Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, University of Buffalo

“Chika Unigwe has evoked a chilling, brutal, and terrifying world with warmth, compassion, and courage. The voices of degraded African women are clearly heard, their bodies vividly rendered, their sorrows deeply understood, and their humanity ultimately realized. On Black Sisters Street is a dark tale luminously told, a stunningly moving book.”—Lee Siegel, author of Love in a Dead Language

“Chika Unigwe writes with moral urgency nourished by a nuanced understanding of the human condition and prose that is elegantly calibrated. And for all the dark turns her work takes, On Black Sisters Street is suffused with warmth, hard-won wisdom, and a deep compassion.”—Chris Abani, author of Becoming Abigail and Song for Night

“A probing and unsettling exploration of the many factors that lead African women into prostitution in Europe . . . an important and accomplished novel that leaves a strong aftertaste. Unigwe gives voice to those who are voiceless . . . and bestows dignity on those who are stripped of it.”—The Independent

Tales From the Global Sex Trade

The New York Times Book Review – April 29, 2011 (Excerpt)

Opponents of immigration often prefer to ignore the tragic forces that compel people to risk death in order to reach our lands of plenty, not to mention the horrors that often await the “lucky” few, once they do arrive. Imagine an Underground Railroad in which the conductor robs and rapes his passengers, and the station porter, once they’ve disembarked, ushers them into a new form of slavery. This unholy traffic in impoverished strivers, imported to service needs Westerners don’t want to think about, is the subject of Chika Unigwe’s novel “On Black Sisters Street.”

Unigwe, who was born in Nigeria, now lives in Belgium. In a rich mix of schoolmarm British and pidgin English, spiked with smatterings of Igbo and Yoruba, she tells the stories of four African sex workers sharing an apartment in Antwerp’s red-light district. But it is only when Sisi, the rebel among them, is murdered, that her three housemates emerge from their self-protective anonymity to share their family histories. [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘On Black Sisters Street’

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – July 20, 2011 (Excerpt)

In Chika Unigwe’s novel “On Black Sisters Street,” the snow-covered streets of Antwerp, Belgium, are a beacon of freedom to the four disadvantaged African women who serve as the book’s protagonists. Recruited in Lagos, Nigeria, by a fat slug of a sex trafficker named Dele, the women work as prostitutes in glass stalls along the byways of Antwerp’s seedy red light district. They dream big, though, and they never make excuses about why they are there.

In fact, big dreams are why the women decide to work in the sex trade in exchange for passage to Europe, which they view as a paradise of opportunity and riches, far removed from the crushing squalor and bleak opportunities in Africa. The question of what makes a victim is very much at the core of this chilling piece of fiction. And the women — Sisi, Ama, Joyce and Efe — refuse to characterize themselves as such, no matter how tragic the circumstances that pushed them to choose life as prostitutes.

It is this defiance that gives the fierce women with their strength as characters , and it is this defiance that makes the many men who populate the book look even more vile. If the book has one major fault, it is that. The men in the story are so contemptible they come off as stereotypes, all fitting into one of five too-neat categories: weak, cruel, cowardly, vicious and evil. [Read the full article...]

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by Lorelei Bell Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...] – Including an excerpt of the first chapter.

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Whenever Lula feels pressure from Don, her heroic immigration lawyer; or Mister Stanley, her melancholy employer; or Zeke, his moody teenage son; she offers a wry observation about how brutal life is in her native Albania to ensure their sympathy. She also needs to remind herself to be grateful for living legally in the U.S., in spite of how lonely and bored she is working as a nanny in New Jersey. Lula doesn’t do much, since Zeke is old enough to be applying to college, but his father doesn’t want him home alone after his imbalanced mother’s abrupt disappearance. Between trips to Guantanamo, Don encourages Lula to write a memoir titled My New American Life, a clever setup that allows Prose great freedom in crafting Lula’s comically ironic and heartbreakingly guileless voice.

In deftly choreographed scenes of caustic hilarity, from awkward meals to fumbled romance, Prose articulates both Lula’s hopefulness and homesickness as she contends with Mister Stanley and Zeke’s despair, Don’s righteous indignation, and the frightening demands of three Albanian guys who show up in a black Lexus SUV. Prose is dazzling in her sixteenth book of spiky fiction, a fast-flowing, bittersweet, brilliantly satirical immigrant story that subtly embodies the cultural complexity and political horrors of the Balkans and Bush-Cheney America.

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Prose continues to ascend in popularity and acclaim, having just been honored with the prestigious Washington University International Humanities Medal. –Donna Seaman, Booklist

She’s Making Friends in a New Place

The New York Times Book Review – April 21, 2011 (Excerpt)

Francine Prose’s characters seem to live under the banner of that famous Rilke line: “You must change your life.” In “Bigfoot Dreams”(1986) a woman loses her job and is forced to reassess her life. In “A Changed Man” (2005) a neo-Nazi has an epiphany after taking a tab of Ecstasy and decides to make amends for his former racist beliefs. And in many of the stories in “Women and Children First” (1988) people flirt with a variety of religions and spiritual rejuvenation programs in attempts to remake — or at least renovate — their mind-sets.

Lula, the heroine of “My New American Life,” Ms. Prose’s diverting but clichéd new novel, also wants to change her life. Lula has left Albania for New York City, where she looks at fellow subway riders and thinks: “She wanted to stay in this city with them, she wanted to have what they had. She wanted it all, the green card, the citizenship, the vote. The income taxes! The Constitutional rights. The two cars in the garage. The garage. The driver’s license.”

Yes, Lula wants the American Dream, and she soon finds herself living it — sort of — in a New Jersey suburb, working as a companion (i.e., nanny) to Zeke, the teenage son of an idealistic professor turned Wall Street banker whom she calls Mister Stanley. He tells her his wife left them to go to Norway “because she wanted to start over, somewhere clean and white.” [Read the full article...]

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Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

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Editorial Reviews

“Arrival City brilliantly captures the breakneck pace of this ‘great migration,’ as the peasants of the poor world relocate to their own megacities—and ours. And it brings profoundly good news from the mean streets . . . Bottom of Form
Doug Saunders, a Canadian journalist skilled in both colourful reportage and sustaining a good argument, provides a badly needed progressive and optimistic narrative about our future. This is the perfect antidote to the doom-laden determinism of the last popular book on urbanisation, Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums . . . This may be the best popular book on cities since Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities half a century ago. Certainly, it shares the same optimism about human aspiration amid overcrowded buildings and unplanned urban jungles, and the same plea for planners to help rather than stifle those dreams . . . Few books can make rationalists feel optimistic and empowered for the future. This one does.”
—The Guardian

“Brilliantly researched, hugely valuable new book. . . . A testament to the value of research and knowledge. . . . Arrival City is a masterpiece of reporting, one of the most valuable and lucid works on public policy published anywhere in years. That Saunders produced it now, as journalism is moving more and more toward the temporary, makes it even more remarkable. As the business he works in strives every day to give consumers less information more often, Saunders does the opposite. He takes the long view. He questions perceived wisdom and finds answers in research, reporting and facts.”
—Edmonton Journal (review also appeared in The Vancouver Sun and The Gazette)

“[This] book not only ranks as one of the year’s most engaging and important works of non-fiction. It gives a vital resource to everyone who wants to learn about the pursuit of the public good in an era of challenged or enfeebled nation-states. With sharply written case-studies from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the banlieues of Paris and the so-called ‘slums’ of Mumbai, Saunders shows that the ‘arrival city’ of informal communities, where migrants from rural hinterlands to urban centres gather, presents not simply one of the world’s most pressing problems. It also offers us the most promising solutions . . . For his part, Saunders extends the debate about globalisation and immigration to embrace the lessons of urban history. In his close attention to the voices of actual incomers—many of them Muslims in Europe, in all their diversity; even more not—he also supplies a hugely welcome antidote to the toxic nonsense about ‘Eurabia.’”
—Boyd Tonkin, Independent

“Provocative . . .  Arrival City addresses the great neglected trend of the 21st century: urbanisation. Travelling across the globe, from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to Nairobi’s slums and Berlin’s Turkish enclave, Saunders weaves the tales of individual migrants through his vast story, that of the current, final great human movement—involving a third of our species—from the countryside to the city . . . A powerful work . . . But Arrival City is above all a warning. Migration is changing our world, and Saunders believes our reaction to it now will determine whether it can help eliminate poverty or whether it will cause catastrophe.”
—The Evening Standard

“Doug Saunders’s important new book, Arrival City, deals with an unglamorous but bitingly important issue: the largest ever human migration . . . While various academic titles have plumbed this phenomenon, no single book—until now—has breathed such life and human drama into it . . . The book engages while remaining serious. It pulls in the reader by centring its storyline on the fate of its numerous lead characters . . . The book tells a fascinating tale . . . Doug Saunders’s greatest strength lies in the global breadth of his reportage, which moves from the alleys of Mumbai to the soulless banlieues of Paris with the urgency of an international spy thriller. His evocative descriptions of open sewers, precarious dwellings, dark, dangerous spaces, noisy slum factories and the indomitable spirit of humanity transform a complex, serious subject into a page-turning read.”
—The Literary Review

“The book’s focus is not the migration itself, but what happens in the cities of arrival . . . Saunders’s approach is through anecdotes and vignettes, but he has done his legwork so they cumulate into a persuasive whole . . . Highly readable.”
—The Financial Times

“Saunders looks beyond what he sees as a pretty transitional flight and instead focuses, to absorbing effect, on the destination cities . . . Recent books on the phenomenon of mass migration have been riddled with portents of gloom . . . Saunders’ thesis is far more positive . . . Serving as both a wide-ranging examination of the present—and a measured look into the future—Arrival City is an absorbing, enlightening read.”
—The Sunday Business Post

“What’s . . . unusual . . . is that Saunders’s look at life inside the slums brims with hope, redemption and possibility. . . . Saunder’s writing style is sumptuous and it’s clear that he is more portraitist than statistician: he meanders through slums, noting the smells, colours and sounds. . . . By personally acquainting readers with humanity on the margins, it just may open your mind to the aspirations of billions of people that few in the prosperous west take the time to consider.”
—SEE Magazine

“This book is a broadly researched, passionate and portentous call for a new way to look at the experience of migrants. It is essential reading for policymakers—and for all who look at the future of cities with a mix of hope and fear. . . . A well-argued treatise on urban planning.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“[A] timely contribution to the discourse on global cities. . . . Saunders’s contribution is valuable. It combines two virtues not often encountered in the literature: a focus on the margins of very large cities, where new arrivals mostly negotiate their first steps to urbanization, and an immediacy of reportage in the real details of individual stories. . . . Saunders has travelled far and listened hard. . . . The book is a sympathetic and, finally, optimistic work of social journalism. . . . Doug Saunders offers a readable, immediate social history of how we might be getting there [future cities].”
—Mark Kingwell, The Globe and Mail

“His premise is well argued. . . . Saunders’s prescription for dealing with urbanization . . . is eminently reasonable, and it is mostly borne out by the findings presented in the book.”
—Quill & Quire

Want a New Life? Wait Here for a While

The New York Times Book Review – March 17, 2011 (Excerpt)

Doug Saunders’s first book, “Arrival City,” reads like a special issue of The Economist, that estimable weekly, in ways that are mostly good but sometimes not. You can envision its subtitle stamped in 18-point type on the magazine’s cover: “How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World.”

Serious, mightily researched, lofty and humane, “Arrival City” is packed with salient detail and could hardly be more timely. Mr. Saunders, the European bureau chief for the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail, visits the world’s great sprawling shantytowns and slums — he prefers the term arrival cities — on the outskirts of places like Mumbai, Rio, London, Paris, Chongqing and Los Angeles and speaks eloquently for them.

He presents these fringe worlds not as fetid ghettos or pots of simmering radicalism. Instead, he argues, they are kilns of reverberating energy and optimism where the world’s rural downtrodden seek a foothold in the modern world. These people — losers to too many of us, though not to themselves or to those they left behind in small villages — wish to receive the developed world’s simplest yet most grace-filled benediction: a chance, through hard work, to enter the flowing middle class. We frustrate their desires at our economic, social and moral peril. [Read the full article...]

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On November 25, 1783, the last British troops pulled out of New York City, bringing the American Revolution to an end. Patriots celebrated their departure and the confirmation of U.S. independence. But for tens of thousands of American loyalists, the British evacuation spelled worry, not jubilation. What would happen to them in the new United States? Would they and their families be safe? Facing grave doubts about their futures, some sixty thousand loyalists—one in forty members of the American population—decided to leave their homes and become refugees elsewhere in the British Empire. They sailed for Britain, for Canada, for Jamaica, and for the Bahamas; some ventured as far as Sierra Leone and India. Wherever they went, the voyage out of America was a fresh beginning, and it carried them into a dynamic if uncertain new world.

A groundbreaking history of the revolutionary era, Liberty’s Exiles tells the story of this remarkable global diaspora. Through painstaking archival research and vivid storytelling, award-winning historian Maya Jasanoff re-creates the journeys of ordinary individuals whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events. She tells of refugees like Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who spent nearly thirty years as a migrant, searching for a home in Britain, Jamaica, and Canada. And of David George, a black preacher born into slavery, who found freedom and faith in the British Empire, and eventually led his followers to seek a new Jerusalem in Sierra Leone. Mohawk leader Joseph Brant resettled his people under British protection in Ontario, while the adventurer William Augustus Bowles tried to shape a loyalist Creek state in Florida. For all these people and more, it was the British Empire—not the United States—that held the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet as they dispersed across the empire, the loyalists also carried things from their former homes, revealing an enduring American influence on the wider British world.

Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, Liberty’s Exiles is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative new analysis—a book that explores an unknown dimension of America’s founding to illuminate the meanings of liberty itself.

About Maya Jasanoff

Maya Jasanoff was educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and Yale, and is currently an associate professor of history at Harvard University. Her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850, was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in numerous publications including The Economist, The Guardian, and The Sunday Times (London). She has recently been a fellow of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has contributed essays to the London Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books.

Editorial Review

As well as a war of independence, the Revolutionary War was a civil conflict in which the losers, white, black, and Indian loyalists, paid dearly. Facing retribution from the victorious patriots, tens of thousands fled the new U.S. to havens in the British Empire. Jasanoff positions her history as the most comprehensive treatment of this topic; accomplished as scholarship, it appeals to general-interest readers through her narrative accounts of several refugees’ fates after mass evacuations in 1783.

And it will strongly appeal to black-history readers because of Jasanoff”s sifting of abundant documentary evidence generated by Britain’s wartime promise to emancipate slaves who fought in its ranks. Free black loyalists arrived in Nova Scotia, where racial tension impelled some to settle in Sierra Leone, while enslaved black loyalists suffered even harsher consequences, their white loyalist owners forcing them to relocate to Florida, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. Wherever loyalists started their lives anew in Britain, Canada, India, and even Australia Jasanoff dramatizes their travails in this discerning social and political history of an overlooked side of the American Revolution. –Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

More Editorial Reviews

“Spirited and engaging…[Jasanoff] has turned her remarkable historical talents to the experiences of the tens of thousands of loyalists who felt compelled to leave the North American colonies that became the United States…One of the strengths of her deeply researched book is the extent to which she was able to recover the stories of some of these loyalist refugees.” —Gordon S. Wood, The New York Review of Books

“A masterful account of the dispersal of the loyalists…Jasanoff’s notable achievement is to engage the reader’s interest, and sympathies, in the travails of the Revolution’s losers. It will be thoroughly rewarding, even for the reader already familiar with the fates of the winners. “ —The Boston Globe

“[There are] many revelations in this very well-researched and fluently written book…Jasanoff has written [the loyalists] a fitting tribute.” —Andrew Roberts, The Daily Beast

“Losers seldom get to write the history, but the American loyalists have at last got their historian with Maya Jasanoff.  This is not just the story of their poignant and often tragic fate during the war for independence, but also the story of the loyalist diaspora, the experience of 65,000 men and women, black and white, as they spread into Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, and India.  No one has told this story before, and Jasanoff tells it with uncommon style and grace.” —Joseph J. Ellis

“The days are long gone when American history was written not only by the victors but also about them. Yet we have had to wait too long for a history of the Loyalists who fought against the American Revolution, and lost. Maya Jasanoff has done more than merely rescue them from the condescension of posterity. She has made them live on the page. I can think of few books published in the past thirty years that shed more brilliant and revelatory light on the events of the revolutionary era than Liberty’s Exiles. It is more than just a work of first-class scholarship on a par with Linda Colley’s Britons. It is a deeply moving masterpiece that fulfils the historian’s most challenging ambition: to revivify past experience.” —Niall Ferguson

“Liberty’s Exiles is a book which in scope and originality, global reach and research, intellectual curiosity and sheer provocative panache– upturning in its wake whole applecarts of unchallenged assumptions– can sustain comparison with Linda Colley or the young Simon Schama. The truth is that Maya Jasanoff is not just a very good writer, an indefatigable researcher and a fine historian, she is also a bit of a genius.” —William Dalrymple

“Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles places the loyalist experience and the aftermath of the American Revolution in an entirely new light. Alongside the Spirit of 1776, Jasanoff gives us the Spirit of 1783, dedicated to remaking the mighty British Empire, and then offers a stunning reinterpretation of the Loyalists’ complicated role in that remaking. Her meticulously researched and superbly written account  is historical revision at its finest, and it affirms her place as one of the very finest historians of the rising generation.” —Sean Wilentz

Maya Jasanoff’s “Liberty’s Exiles,” on British Loyalists after the revolution

The Washington Post Book World – March 13, 2011 (Excerpt)

What happens to people who take the losing side in a revolution or a civil war?

In this ambitious, empathetic and sometimes lyrical book, Maya Jasanoff tells the story of the loyalist exiles of the American Revolution – the 60,000 people who fled the 13 colonies of North America after their countrymen declared their independence, founded a republic and successfully defended their revolution in a war that set friends, neighbors and family members against one another. Those stalwart defenders of British rule eventually dispersed into far-flung parts of the world. Although other historians have studied the loyalists and parts of their widespread migration, “Liberty’s Exiles” justly claims to be “the first global history of the loyalist diaspora.”

Historians estimate the total number of loyalists at about 20 percent of the population of the United States at the time of the revolution, or roughly a half-million men, women and children. Most of them remained in the new nation. The exiles were the outer fringes of the category, people so committed to the crown or so alienated from the “patriots” that they had to leave. Why? [Read the full article...]

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A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

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Danticat is at her best when writing from inside Haiti. . . . As [her] recollections show, her singular achievement is not to have remade the actual Haiti, but to have recreated it. She has wound the fabric of Haitian life into her work and made it accessible to a wide audience of Americans and other outsiders. . . . Danticat’s tender new book about loss and the unquenchable passion for homeland makes us remember the powerful material from which most fiction is wrought: it comes from childhood, and place. No matter her geographic and temporal distance from these, Danticat writes about them with the immediacy of love. — Amy Wilentz, New York Times Book Review

A lean collection of jaw-breaking horrors side by side with luminous insights. . . . In Danticat’s many remarkable stories and pensées from the gut, one locates the inimitable power of truth. Authorship becomes an act of subversion when one’s words might be read and acted on by someone risking his or her life if only to read them. — Publishers Weekly

Danticat’s writing is crisp and clear, reminiscent of what the very best essay writing once aspired to be. . . . Not just another writer’s book about writing, this volume delves into the suffering that affects artists who suspend themselves from time and place to create. . . . Her book should be read by students, historians and lovers of well-crafted writing. — Nedra Crowe-Evers, Library Journal

Danticat is a marvelous writer, blending personal anecdotes, history and larger reflections without turning the immigrant writer into a victim, misunderstood by all. — Sandip Roy, San Francisco Chronicle

[Edwidge Danticat's] mission as a writer has been to speak from the diaspora for Haiti’s disfranchised and silenced. . . . That responsibility weighs heavily in these essays, which dwell on her personal sorrows as much as those of the Haitian masses. . . . Her unlettered Haitian relatives call her a jounalis, a journalist writing with a purpose. She doesn’t let them down. — Amanda Heller, Boston Globe

Danticat’s prose is spare and piercing; she doesn’t waste words. Her ideas are never cloaked in layers of metaphor, yet every sentence has a lyrical, persuasive quality. . . . Within this stirring collection, one theme struck me more strongly than any other: for artists, the drive to create triumphs over everything else. Or it should. . . . Creating dangerously means telling the truth–working without or in spite of fear. — Jennifer Levin, Santa Fe New Mexican

Whether she is profiling a courageous Haitian photojournalist, writing about a visit to relatives in a rural village, or meditating on the career of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Danticat is always also writing about her responsibilities as a part of what is called, in Creole, the dyaspora. . . . [T]houghtful, powerful. — Adam Kirsch, Barnes and Noble Review

Whether the topic is Haiti’s war of independence, 9/11, the artist, musician and actor Jean-Michel Basquiat, the January earthquake and its aftermath, Danticat writes with a compassionate insight but without a trace of sentimentality. Her prose is energetic, her vision is clear, the tragedies seemingly speaking for themselves. — Betsy Willeford, Miami Herald

Danticat’s writing is inviting, beautiful and honest. — Color Online

[Danticat] avoids grandiose claims about the insightfulness of the exile–while honouring the complexity of the immigrant artist’s role, with its precariousness and its drive to make connections. — Scott McLemee, National

What is best in this collection are the vivid portraits of the author’s childhood in Haiti (and then as a book-obsessed teenager visiting the library in Brooklyn), intermingled with return journeys to visit relatives, collect sacks of coffee and observe the nation changing. There are sharp thoughts on Basquiat, Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Haitian earthquake. — Steven Poole, Guardian

Focused on her medium of ‘word art,’ though incorporating theater and visual arts, Danticat pieces together a multi-essay response to the creatives’ lament . . . how do, why do and should we create, in this at-best messy and at-worst dangerous world? — Kristin Theil, Oregonian

Have you ever started reading a book which draws you in within the first few sentences and leaves you unable to put it down until the very last word and then, because it amazed and moved you more than anything you can remember, you immediately read it again? . . . Create Dangerously, is one of those books. . . . Danticat is that rare writer who can make you smile as your soul aches. Although Create Dangerously is not an easy book to read it is disturbing and particularly controversial in places it is, nonetheless, a consistently passionate, deeply thought-provoking and highly important book which should be read, reread and then passed on to new hands. — Josh Rosner, Canberra Times

‘Create Dangerously’: The Heart And Healing Of Haiti

NPR Book Review – November 17, 2010 (Excerpt)

Ever since an earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, and the airwaves buzzed with reports of thousands upon thousands dead, and with the catchphrases that have become emblematic of Haiti — “poorest nation in the hemisphere,” “tragically deforested,” “overpopulated” — ever since those scenes and faces and wailing voices, I have been searching for a guide through this devastation.

I admit I Googled my favorite, trusted writers on Haiti: Madison Smartt Bell, Amy Wilentz, Mark Danner. But the writer I most wanted to hear from was the Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat. I had read and reread her piece in The New Yorker, soon after the earthquake, where she told the story of her cousin Maxo, his son and some students who were being tutored, all buried under the rubble. The piece was written in such heartbreaking, clear-eyed prose, with no trace of self-pity, that it seemed not made by the hand of man, or acheiropoietos, a term Danticat uses to title one of the essays in her astonishing new book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. [Read the full article...]

Editorial Reviews

Danticat is at her best when writing from inside Haiti. . . . As [her] recollections show, her singular achievement is not to have remade the actual Haiti, but to have recreated it. She has wound the fabric of Haitian life into her work and made it accessible to a wide audience of Americans and other outsiders. . . . Danticat’s tender new book about loss and the unquenchable passion for homeland makes us remember the powerful material from which most fiction is wrought: it comes from childhood, and place. No matter her geographic and temporal distance from these, Danticat writes about them with the immediacy of love. — Amy Wilentz, New York Times Book Review

A lean collection of jaw-breaking horrors side by side with luminous insights. . . . In Danticat’s many remarkable stories and pensées from the gut, one locates the inimitable power of truth. Authorship becomes an act of subversion when one’s words might be read and acted on by someone risking his or her life if only to read them. — Publishers Weekly

Danticat’s writing is crisp and clear, reminiscent of what the very best essay writing once aspired to be. . . . Not just another writer’s book about writing, this volume delves into the suffering that affects artists who suspend themselves from time and place to create. . . . Her book should be read by students, historians and lovers of well-crafted writing. — Nedra Crowe-Evers, Library Journal

Danticat is a marvelous writer, blending personal anecdotes, history and larger reflections without turning the immigrant writer into a victim, misunderstood by all. — Sandip Roy, San Francisco Chronicle

Focused on her medium of ‘word art,’ though incorporating theater and visual arts, Danticat pieces together a multi-essay response to the creatives’ lament . . . how do, why do and should we create, in this at-best messy and at-worst dangerous world? — Kristin Theil, Oregonian

Danticat’s prose is spare and piercing; she doesn’t waste words. Her ideas are never cloaked in layers of metaphor, yet every sentence has a lyrical, persuasive quality. . . . Within this stirring collection, one theme struck me more strongly than any other: for artists, the drive to create triumphs over everything else. Or it should. . . . Creating dangerously means telling the truth–working without or in spite of fear. — Jennifer Levin, Santa Fe New Mexican

Whether she is profiling a courageous Haitian photojournalist, writing about a visit to relatives in a rural village, or meditating on the career of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Danticat is always also writing about her responsibilities as a part of what is called, in Creole, the dyaspora. . . . [T]houghtful, powerful. — Adam Kirsch, Barnes and Noble Review

Whether the topic is Haiti’s war of independence, 9/11, the artist, musician and actor Jean-Michel Basquiat, the January earthquake and its aftermath, Danticat writes with a compassionate insight but without a trace of sentimentality. Her prose is energetic, her vision is clear, the tragedies seemingly speaking for themselves. — Betsy Willeford, Miami Herald

Danticat’s writing is inviting, beautiful and honest. — Color Online

Review

“In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in crisis. Inspired by Albert Camus lecture Create Dangerously, and combining memoir and essay, Danticat tells the stories of artists, including herself who create despite or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them.”

The above is from the inside flap and truly captures what this book is about. Danticat opens with the 1964 public execution in Haiti, under dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier of two artist, Marcel Numa, Louis Drouin. The author quickly establishes that some artist risk their lives to create and speak in a hostile environment. This work addresses the role immigrant artist must play for their birth countries that suffer from censorship and unjust rule. We learn about many Haitian artist. Some who gave hope and inspiration, others who were exiled or murdered. Danticat tells us about Jean Dominque, a journalist who spent his life speaking out against the government and was assassinated. Sharing stories and memories, Danticat makes Dominque real.

“During the dictatorship in the early 1960′s, a young Jean had created a cinema club, hosting weekly screenings at the Alliance Francaise in Port-au-Prince. There he showed films such as Federico Fellini’s La Strada, which is, among other things, about a girl’s near enslavement as a circus performer. “If you see a good film correctly” Jean said, “the grammar of that film is a political act. Everytime you see Fellini’s La Strada, even if there is no question of fascism, of politcal persecution, you feel something against the black part of life.” Another favorite of his was the Alian Resnais documentary Night and Fog, which describes the horrors of concentration camps. “To us, Auschwitz was Fort Dimanche,” he said, referring to the Duvalier-era dungeonlike prison where thousands of Haitians were tortured and killed.”

Danticat’s writing is inviting, beautiful and honest. At times I felt the author shared more then she probably thought she would. Create Dangerously is a very powerful read. – Amazon Review

‘Create Dangerously’: The Heart And Healing Of Haiti

NPR Book Review – November 17, 2010 (Excerpt)

Ever since an earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, and the airwaves buzzed with reports of thousands upon thousands dead, and with the catchphrases that have become emblematic of Haiti — “poorest nation in the hemisphere,” “tragically deforested,” “overpopulated” — ever since those scenes and faces and wailing voices, I have been searching for a guide through this devastation.

I admit I Googled my favorite, trusted writers on Haiti: Madison Smartt Bell, Amy Wilentz, Mark Danner. But the writer I most wanted to hear from was the Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat. I had read and reread her piece in The New Yorker, soon after the earthquake, where she told the story of her cousin Maxo, his son and some students who were being tutored, all buried under the rubble. The piece was written in such heartbreaking, clear-eyed prose, with no trace of self-pity, that it seemed not made by the hand of man, or acheiropoietos, a term Danticat uses to title one of the essays in her astonishing new book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. [Read the full article...]

Early on in How to Read the Air–the second novel from the author of the widely acclaimed debut, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears–Jonas Woldemariam and his soon-to-be wife Angela attend a party, where they tell casual, false stories about Angela’s absent father and arrive, all of a sudden, at the fulcrum of this elegant and unusual novel. “To them,” Angela notes, “it’s all just one story told over and over. Change the dates and the names but it’s the same.” It’s a theme that Dinaw Mengestu revisits as he selects the chapters from many different stories that converge in Jonas.

Chief among them is Yosef and Mariam’s story: they are Jonas’s Ethiopian parents, estranged from each other in a violent, loveless marriage, each striving more for America’s security than for its dreams. Mengestu takes common ideals of how we’re supposed to live–ranging from the importance of material progress to the popular notion that there’s nothing more American than road trips and country music–and investigates them quite beautifully in characters who are genuine and visionary and do, as Jonas notes, “persist, whether we care to or not, with all our flaws and glory.” –Anne Bartholomew

Dinaw Mengestu reads a passage from How to Read the Air about a young Ethiopian immigrant couple who set off on a road trip in search of a new identity. (Running Time: 17:32)

Review

Jonas Woldemariam was the first person in his family born in the United States. His parents are from Ethiopia. Jonas didn’t have great relationship with them. Now in his 30′s Jonas decides to retrace his parents life in America beginning with a road trip.

In his verison Jonas imagines a better outcome for his parents. He dreams for them if only for a moment. Mengestu’s writing throughout was gorgeous though it was in these moments that I was completely wowed and found myself rereading passages.

The novel alternates between Jonas’ story of his parents, his life and failed marriage. Jonas lives in New York. He meets his wife Angela working at a refugee resettlement center, while punching up (the sadder the better) immigrants’ stories in hopes of getting them American citizenship.

Thanks to the book synopsis I knew Jonas got divorced. The author put so much care into Jonas relationship, I still found myself hoping for a different outcome. Though their marriage didn’t last, at times Jonas and Angela reminded me of George and Coco from Mama Day by Gloria Naylor. I loved Mama Day and the portrayal of George and Coco, so this is not a comparison I would make lightly.

How to Read the Air is a beautifully layered story. Mengestu is a very talented writer and should not be missed. I can definitely [see] this novel on a few best of lists at the end of the year. – Amazon Review

Dinaw Mengestu’s ‘How to Read the Air,’ reviewed by Ron Charles

The Washington Post – November 3, 2010 (Excerpt)

The eerie calm in Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel, “How to Read the Air,” is almost never broken. There are flashes of violence — a black eye, a broken lamp — but those strikes interrupt an atmosphere of smothered despair. Named one of the New Yorker’s best 20 writers under 40, Mengestu earned high praise for his 2007 debut, “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,” about a lonely Ethiopian working in Logan Circle, and his new novel concentrates that theme of alienation even further.

The story contradicts our most cherished cliches of immigrant progress: We expect the parents to work hard, trapped between countries and languages, saving their pennies and toiling at every opportunity, chagrined by their children’s disregard for the old values, their easy integration with American culture. But Mengestu complicates that oft-told tale with a peculiar, psychologically perceptive story that makes one wonder how a country of immigrants could ever survive. [Read the full article...]

Early on in How to Read the Air–the second novel from the author of the widely acclaimed debut, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears–Jonas Woldemariam and his soon-to-be wife Angela attend a party, where they tell casual, false stories about Angela’s absent father and arrive, all of a sudden, at the fulcrum of this elegant and unusual novel. “To them,” Angela notes, “it’s all just one story told over and over. Change the dates and the names but it’s the same.” It’s a theme that Dinaw Mengestu revisits as he selects the chapters from many different stories that converge in Jonas. Chief among them is Yosef and Mariam’s story: they are Jonas’s Ethiopian parents, estranged from each other in a violent, loveless marriage, each striving more for America’s security than for its dreams. Mengestu takes common ideals of how we’re supposed to live–ranging from the importance of material progress to the popular notion that there’s nothing more American than road trips and country music–and investigates them quite beautifully in characters who are genuine and visionary and do, as Jonas notes, “persist, whether we care to or not, with all our flaws and glory.” –Anne Bartholomew

Reviews

Mengestu’s second novel explores themes of the immigrant experience in America. The protagonist, Jonas, is the son of Ethiopian immigrants. Out of contact with his parents and disconnected from his roots, Jonas struggles to construct an identity for himself, often inventing stories about himself and his family, to the point that fact and fiction become entangled.

There are several separate stories here: Jonas’ father’s exodus to America; Jonas’ parents’ road trip through the Midwest; Jonas’ present-day retracing of that trip; and the recently past storyline of Jonas’ rocky relationship with his wife, Angela. There is the potential for this to be somewhat disorienting to the reader but the author handles the multiple threads well. For the reader, it becomes difficult to tell what’s real and what is not in the narrative, thereby not just telling but showing the reader about the disorienting experience of immigration. The author captures the psychological impact of being an immigrant–the shaky identity, the past with gaping holes, the difficulty connecting in a solid way to people around you or even to your own future.

This was a very interesting read that was hard to put down, and a very worthy addition to any collection of literary fiction that focuses on the immigrant experience. – Live2Cruise, Amazon Customer Review

Jonas Woldemariam was the first person in his family born in the United States. His parents are from Ethiopia. Jonas didn’t have great relationship with them. Now in his 30′s Jonas decides to retrace his parents life in America beginning with a road trip.

In his verison Jonas imagines a better outcome for his parents. He dreams for them if only for a moment. Mengestu’s writing throughout was gorgeous though it was in these moments that I was completely wowed and found myself rereading passages.

The novel alternates between Jonas’ story of his parents, his life and failed marriage. Jonas lives in New York. He meets his wife Angela working at a refugee resettlement center, while punching up (the sadder the better) immigrants’ stories in hopes of getting them American citizenship.

Thanks to the book synopsis I knew Jonas got divorced. The author put so much care into Jonas relationship, I still found myself hoping for a different outcome. Though their marriage didn’t last, at times Jonas and Angela reminded me of George and Coco from Mama Day by Gloria Naylor. I loved Mama Day and the portrayal of George and Coco, so this is not a comparison I would make lightly.

How to Read the Air is a beautifully layered story. Mengestu is a very talented writer and should not be missed. I can definitely [see] this novel on a few best of lists at the end of the year. – DAC, Amazon Customer Review

A Novelist’s Voice, Both Exotic and Midwestern

The New York Times – October 15, 2010 (Excerpt)

Early in Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel, “How to Read the Air,” the main character, a troubled young Ethiopian-American named Jonas Woldemariam, goes to a job interview, only to be asked, “Where’s that accent of yours from?” by a prospective boss baffled by his seemingly alien provenance. “Peoria,” Jonas replies, puzzling his interviewer even further.

Life has sometimes been like that for Mr. Mengestu, too. His name, “so clearly foreign and other,” he admits, and pedigree can make it difficult for some of the people he encounters to see past an ostensibly exotic exterior to the very American core underneath.

But as a novelist, Mr. Mengestu, 32, has made such doubts and confusion about identity and belonging his stock in trade. His work is populated by exiles, refugees, émigrés and children of the African diaspora, all struggling both to find a place in the American landscape and to make sense of their attenuated relationship to the world they left behind.

“It’s less about trying to figure out how you occupy these two cultural or racial boundaries and more about what it’s like when you are not particularly attached to either of these two communities,” he said recently in an interview in Manhattan at the offices of his publisher, Riverhead Books. [Read the full article...]

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THE story of my path to American Citizenship begins today, Wednesday, May 12, 2010. I am still waiting for a substantial tax return – well, substantial in my world, and I am planning to use part of that payment to apply for American Citizenship. According to the information I found the last time I looked into the process the application will cost me roughly $700. They – the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in short USCIS – don’t accept credit cards, only money orders. That’s where the tax return comes in handy.

Since the year 2002 I am a permanent,  legal resident with an official alien registration number. As such I was hoping to fall under the responsibility of the Men in Black, but no such luck. In layman’s terms I own a so-called “Green Card,” even though the card is not green at all. In turn, living in the United States of America and owning a permanent resident status for more than three years while married to a green-eyed Irish-American Red-Head entitles me to apply for citizenship.

As a matter of fact, there is no rational explanation why I want to become an American Citizen. Theoretically, I can remain a legal alien for the rest of my natural life, but there are a number of not so rational reasons, and I will detail them in another chapter. For now let’s just say that I owe it to my family, my American-born wife and my American-born son. Add to that a profound love I feel for this country, and that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. I believe, American Citizenship is a privilege. I also believe that the American spirit is like a virus – in the best sense of the word – that brings out the best in every decent human being.

I was born and raised in Germany. Let me explain what that means by distorting a Mark Twain quote: A German (Originally, an Englishman; same difference, though) is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven’t been done before.

Note: This is a work in progress. More info will be added soon.