Books & Ideas
A few months ago, Donatella Rovera was under rocket fire in Misrata, Libya. A couple of weeks ago Salil Shetty was in the slums of Suez, in Egypt, meeting with the families of the first casualties of the Egyptian uprising.
On Friday they were both seated on a sunny deck in Katama, sipping iced water and looking just like any of those other globe-trotters who concentrate here in summer. Except that in their case, the expression citizen of the world really means something.
At the age of 15, Massoud Kohistani was chosen along with 40 other first-time students from Afghanistan to spend a year with an American family and learn about democracy. Massoud touched down on American soil in Washington, D.C. but unfortunately, at the last minute, a few of the students were left without host families or supervision. Welcome to democracy, where freedom to choose can also lead to freedom not to choose.
“These people did what the Emancipation Proclamation could not do, what Lincoln could not do, what the North and South alone could not do,” Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson said, outlining one of many legacies of the Great Migration, which she chronicled in The Warmth of Other Suns, her epic account of this demographic seism.
“They freed themselves.”
W e keep reading. When the writing is bad, it’s a fleeting disappointment but when it’s good, there’s nothing better. When it’s good, it matters in the moment and in our memory; nothing matters more.
Few words are new, but lately they come at us in torrents. Words, words, words career toward us, screaming, tweeting, each true enough but incomplete. Words alone are isolating; writing, telling stories, that’s what takes the isolation away.
Earlier this year, the Gazette interviewed Geraldine Brooks as her latest novel, Caleb’s Crossing, was about to be released:
“I really did spend my entire childhood watching television,” says Alexandra Styron, a claim that stands in stark contrast to her endlessly expansive vocabulary and carefully crafted storytelling.