Repression may be good for journalism, it turns out.
Cuba has jailed more journalists per capita than any nation in the world, yet the number of people willing to take up the risky profession is growing, American officials say.
Read more about the risky profession in the island.
Update: A reader sends this link about five Cubans and Cuban Americans imprisoned in the U.S. Alice Walker is due to speak tomorrow at a forum in their support.
I thought it was a typo, but no. Bill Clinton’s My Life will retail for $35, according to this article. If you’re just looking for titillating details, you’re safer going to the video store. At least there’ll be a payoff down the road.
Three months ago, I mentioned Samuel (The Clash of Civilications) Huntington’s new book Who Are We?, in which he claims that Latinos haven’t assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, a “fact” which threatens U.S. identity. Now that he’s targeting another kind of brown people, let’s see how long it takes before everyone calls him what he is: a maniac. Look, it’s already starting: Carlos Fuentes responds. Also, Roberto Lovato.
David Kipen has an article about MG favorite Vladimir Nabokov. Luckily, the article is more about the writer’s work and his visits to California than about the recent sales of memorabilia or the allegations of plagiarism.
Nabokov’s prose sometimes recalls the private language of identical twins, completely assured in its conspiratorial willingness to be strange. He makes every admiring reader into his twin, which may help explain why many feel so territorial about him. Always oblique yet never obscure, Nabokov’s prose sounds like English on the morning of its birth, with every word equally available to him, and all the ruts of habit gone suddenly smooth.
Read the entire article here.
Stand-up comic Tissa Hami, whose act includes cracking airport jokes while wearing an Islamic Hijab, has put up the lyrics to her Ramadan Song on her website (to be sung to the tune of Adam Sandler’s Hannukah Song, of course.)
Issue No. 2 of the Land-Grant College Review came in the mail yesterday and I curled up on the sofa with it. The magazine has fewer stories this time around, but there is no decline in quality. I quite enjoyed stories by Roy Kesey, Alan Cheuse, and Jim Hanas, among many others. If you’re in New York, why not go to the launch party? It will be at Ode to Go on May 22nd.
One of the great things about blogging is the opportunity to communicate with people who share my interest in books, especially when their opinions are different. I’ve learned a lot these past few years and just wanted to say thank you to my readers for their emails.
The trouble when a book has received or been nominated for nearly every imaginable prize is that it’s often hard to judge the book on its own merit. Cynic that I am, I started reading The Known World with the expectation that, somewhere down the line, I’d find something that would confirm my suspicion of the enormous attention it garnered. Fortunately, I was wrong. This is an extraordinary book.
Jones takes an odd footnote in the history of slavery (the existence of slave-owning black families) and delivers a compelling novel, one that goes beyond the oddity to reveal insights about human nature. The story of Henry Townsend, a former slave who becomes a slaveowner himself, is told in a succession of brief scenes, interspersed with research notes.
Set in fictional Manchester County, Virginia, the novel opens with Henry’s death and follows the events that result from it, through the eyes of a number of characters: his parents, his wife Caldonia, his former master William Robbins, and so on.
Jones’ spare prose often mixes the matter-of-factly with the kind of detail that can break your heart. Witness how, after a wedding, a bride is presented with this gift:
About three o’clock, after matters had quieted down some, Belle went out to where her maid was in the backyard and returned with a slave girl of nine years and had the girl, festooned with a blue ribbon, stand and then twirl about for Winifred. “She’s yours,” Belle told Winifred. “A woman, especially a married one, is nothing without her personal servant.” All the people from Philadelphia were quiet, along with John Skiffington and his father, and the people from Virginia, especially those who knew the cost of good slave flesh, smiled. Belle picked up the hem of the girl’s dress and held it out for Winifred to examine, as if the dress itself were a bonus.
At times The Known World is quite difficult to read, perhaps because of the distance Jones puts between him and his material. But this is a necessary choice, given the complexity of the story and the bleak subject matter. At the same time, he is deeply attuned to the contradictions of human nature and to the moral compromises we make in order to survive in the world.
A couple of months ago, I mentioned that Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home had received some of its original furniture back. Now I hear that the author’s farm, Andalusia, is open to the public.
A new book gives voice to children born of the affairs between French women and Nazi soldiers or, as they were once called, Boche babies.
According to research cited by author Jean-Paul Picaper, a staggering 200,000 were born between 1941 and 1945 – a long-neglected generation of people now entering their 60s, who are at last able to speak out about the shame and trauma they went through. (…) Michelle Colin for example, who was handed over to an orphanage when she was a few weeks old, recalls being made to write out over and again in her jotter the words, “I am the daughter of a Boche.”
The book is called Enfants Maudits.
