Roy Miller's Blog, page 218
April 14, 2017
Book Pins Corporate Greed on a Lust Bred at Harvard
This content was originally published by ANDREW ROSS SORKIN on 14 April 2017 | 9:00 pm.
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His answer? “With economic inequality at a hundred-year high and meaningful progress on climate change and other social and environmental issues embarrassingly paltry, the answer to that question is obvious. It is not.”
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Citing a report from the Aspen Institute, Mr. McDonald explains that “when students enter business school, they believe that the purpose of a corporation is to produce goods and services for the benefit of society.”
“When they graduate,” he continues, “they believe that it is to maximize shareholder value.”
Mr. McDonald brilliantly tells the story of the school’s creation in 1908, when its mission was to educate the next generation of business managers. Edwin Gay, its first dean, defined business as the “activity of making things to sell at a profit — decently.”
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Duff McDonald, a veteran business journalist, pulls back the curtain on Harvard Business School in his new book, “The Golden Passport.”
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Christopher Wahl
But, the author says, somewhere during the mid-1980s, something went very wrong: “The money got too good.”
The money he refers to is the tsunami of job offers that Harvard students received from Wall Street, and the funding the school raked in from its well-heeled alumni.
In fairness, Harvard Business School makes an easy punching bag, given its stature as the top feeder for big business. This is hardly the first time the institution has been criticized.
And it is too much to paint all 76,000-plus alumni as being ethically challenged, as Mr. McDonald appears to imply. Indeed, many of the school’s vaunted alumni are among the most talented executives in the country, and many are trying to think about stakeholders holistically.
Yet in example after example, Mr. McDonald sets out his thesis that money and influence have distorted both the school’s curriculum and the worldview espoused by its professors, who themselves are on the payroll of corporate America as part-time advisers and consultants.
“For a whole semester, for example, the school is basically bought and paid for by the consulting firms,” Mr. McDonald writes, quoting Casey Gerald, a member of the class of 2014 whose rousing speech at the school went viral on YouTube.
The moneyed interests of employers prompted Harvard, Mr. McDonald contends, to hire the economist Michael C. Jensen, a financial economics specialist, in 1985. Mr. Jensen is famous for advocating the “principal-agent theory” — the idea that investors, rather than corporate managers or the board of directors, should have the most influence.
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Mr. McDonald describes Mr. Jensen’s arrival as “the moment of peak paradox for H.B.S.,” contending that Mr. Jensen’s “ideologically driven hijacking of the study of finance served as a cynical repudiation of everything that had come before him at the school.”
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[image error]The Baker Library at the Harvard Business School in Boston. The school produces a disproportionate number of the nation’s business leaders.
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Charles Krupa/Associated Press
With the elevation of Mr. Jensen, Mr. McDonald writes, “H.B.S. had nurtured the professional manager from his birth and then helped to kill him.”
The book is filled with anecdotal evidence of Mr. McDonald’s argument. In once instance, he draws from a paper Mr. Jensen co-wrote in which the professor recounted a well-known story about the playwright George Bernard Shaw. As the story goes, Shaw had asked “an actress if she would sleep with him for a million dollars,” Mr. McDonald writes. “When she agreed, he changed his offer to $10, to which she responded with outrage, asking him what kind of woman he thought she was. His reply: ‘We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling about the price.’”
To Mr. McDonald, Harvard teaches its students that “we’re all whores.”
Continuing his train of logic, he writes: “If everybody assumes you’re a whore, you might as well grab as much money as possible while you’re still in demand.”
Mr. McDonald’s book also makes a provocative argument that Harvard Business School, and, by extension, the American business school complex, is responsible for out-of-whack compensation schemes for top management.
He quotes Julian Birkinshaw, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the London Business School, saying, “There’s no doubt that business schools are complicit” in the exorbitant pay packages in boardrooms.
“We benefit financially from it as well,” the quotation continues. “Clearly, the fees we can charge M.B.A. students are correlated with the salaries they can get when they go get jobs.”
In the end, Mr. McDonald acknowledges that “one shouldn’t expect Harvard Business School to be teaching courses on how to overthrow the capitalist economy.”
But Mr. McDonald does raise enough salient questions that maybe the school should be asking: Should we create a case study about ourselves?
Correction: April 14, 2017
A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misstated the city in Massachusetts where Baker Library at the Harvard Business School is located. It is in Boston, on Cambridge.
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Book Deals: Week of April 17, 2017
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Algonquin re-ups an NBA finalist, Dutton buys a middle grade debut, Viking strikes a six-figure picture book deal, and more in this week's notable book deals.
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11 New Books We Recommend This Week
This content was originally published by on 13 April 2017 | 8:12 pm.
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NO ONE CARES ABOUT CRAZY PEOPLE: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America, by Ron Powers. (Hachette Books, $28.) Powers, his wife and two sons had a beautiful life in Middlebury, Vt., until their younger son began to exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia at age 17; their elder son also developed the disease. This extraordinary and courageous book combines a densely reported look at mental illness through history and a moving account of how this family struggled with an illness that eventually claimed one son’s life.
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NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US, by Stephanie Powell Watts. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99.) A successful African-American man returns to his declining North Carolina hometown and builds a mansion, hoping to attract his now-married high school sweetheart in this first novel, a riff on “The Great Gatsby.” Watts writes about ordinary people leading ordinary lives with an extraordinary level of empathy and attention.
I AM FLYING INTO MYSELF: Selected Poems, 1960-2014, by Bill Knott. Edited by Thomas Lux. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Sleep, death and desire turn up over and over across these pages, but dark as they are, Knott’s poems evince joyful wordplay and linguistic virtuosity. This book, published three years after his death, serves as a treasury of his colossal talent — what the editor calls “Knott’s high imagination, great skills, singular music and crazy-beautiful heart.”
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THE SPIDER NETWORK: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History, by David Enrich. (Custom House/Morrow, $29.99.) It’s hard to keep up with the major financial scandals perpetrated by Wall Street bankers, traders and executives, let alone the oft-overlooked ones. Enrich’s fast-paced account tells the story of the stranger-than-fiction characters who made huge profits by rigging Libor, the interest rate that sets the price of borrowed money all over the world.
ONE LAST WORD: Wisdom From the Harlem Renaissance, written and illustrated by Nikki Grimes and others. (Bloomsbury, $18.99; ages 8 and up.) Haunting poems pay tribute to Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett and others, in this book that features gorgeous works by 15 black artists, including Javaka Steptoe, the 2017 Caldecott medalist.
GHACHAR GHOCHAR, by Vivek Shanbhag. Translated by Srinath Perur. (Penguin, $15, paper.) Sudden wealth makes a family ruthless in this crisply plotted novella, translated from Kannada, a spiky, scary story of moral decline and a parable of rising India. Admirers of this austere little tale, who include Suketu Mehta and Katherine Boo, have compared the author to Chekhov.
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MY DARLING DETECTIVE, by Howard Norman. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) Vandalism, murder and shadowy pasts mingle in Norman’s literary mystery, an enticing old-school homage to noir — and to a Robert Capa photograph — set in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Norman knows how to weave an enticing and satisfying mystery, one tantalizing thread at a time.
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2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 14
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 14 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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I never like sharing bad news, but I’m especially not fond of sharing family news. Marie Elena Good shared on Facebook that Andrea Heiberg, a member of the Poetic Asides family, died of cancer on Monday. Like so many on the street, she was an uplifting and poetic voice for so many other poets. She will be missed.
For today’s prompt, pick a popular saying and make that the title of your poem; then, write your poem. Some possible titles might include: “Blood Is Thicker Than Water,” “You Can’t Judge a Book By Its Cover,” “More Than You Can Shake a Stick At,” and so many others. Click here if you want more ideas.
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The 2017 Poet’s Market, edited by Robert Lee Brewer, includes hundreds of poetry markets, including listings for poetry publications, publishers, contests, and more! With names, contact information, and submission tips, poets can find the right markets for their poetry and achieve more publication success than ever before.
In addition to the listings, there are articles on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry–so that poets can learn the ins and outs of writing poetry and seeking publication. Plus, it includes a one-year subscription to the poetry-related information on WritersMarket.com.. All in all, it’s the best resource for poets looking to secure publication.
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Here’s my attempt at a Popular Saying Poem:
“not the sharpest tool in the shed”
not the sharpest tool in the shed
nor the brightest bulb in the house
not the prettiest bird in the sky
nor the wittiest man on the street
but i am your man & your fool
& anything else you need of me
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He’s not a sharp tool or bright bulb; he’s just a human being.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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Find more poetic posts here:
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April 13, 2017
Silos, Sulfur and Stolen Identities: The Best of New Crime Fiction
This content was originally published by MARILYN STASIO on 13 April 2017 | 9:00 pm.
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Jeffery Deaver’s forte is the diabolical puzzle mystery, and THE BURIAL HOUR (Grand Central, $28) is so devilishly tricky you can practically smell the sulfur fumes. Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic criminal forensic scientist who figures in Deaver’s brainteasers, is partial to cases that are, like the explosives his team discovers early on, “highly and extremely and deliciously rare.” That pretty much describes the modus operandi of a perp called the Composer, who kidnaps his victims and half-strangles them in order to capture their gasping breaths for the composition he calls his “hangman’s waltz.” If he can pull it off, the cacophonous world will once again be in perfect harmony.
Rhyme uses his trusty gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer to analyze the evidence that his band of science geeks brings to the lab in his Manhattan townhouse. And the story perks up considerably when he and his posse follow the Composer to Naples and begin working with the Italian police. In a bold plot twist, Deaver folds Rhyme’s inquiries into a broader investigation of a humanitarian challenge shared by the whole world. Takes guts, that does.
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What price anonymity? Leah Stevens, the disgraced reporter who narrates Megan Miranda’s eerie suspense thriller THE PERFECT STRANGER (Simon & Schuster, $25), thinks she’s found refuge from the mess she made in Boston (“Libel. Culpable. Lawsuit. Arrest.”) when she moves into a cabin in the woods of western Pennsylvania with a former roommate named Emmy. But when Emmy disappears, Leah realizes how little she knows about her old chum.
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“Where did Emmy work, exactly?” Come to think of it, what’s her last name? Credibility gaps aside, Miranda smartly examines the slippery theme of personal identity. In a world where identities are regularly lost, stolen or sacrificed for reasons innocent and otherwise, it’s not enough to wonder where Emmy has gone. We need to know who she is, if she is who she says she is — and if she exists at all.
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Pity Inspector Ian Frey of the newly formed and disarmingly titled Commission for the Elucidation of Unsolved Cases Presumably Related to the Odd and Ghostly. Ever since Scotland Yard saw fit to transfer him to Edinburgh, that foppish dandy has been partnered with Adolphus (Nine-Nails) McGray, “the most outlandish, vulgar, infamous man that Scotland has ever spawned.”
In Oscar de Muriel’s mad romp, A FEVER OF THE BLOOD (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), the comically ill-matched detectives are called out on New Year’s Day in 1889 to recapture Lord Joel Ardglass, who has broken out of the lunatic asylum after apparently poisoning a nurse. Although Inspector Frey is inclined to follow conventional police procedures, Nine-Nails prefers to consult the “treatises on the occult, crazy pharmacopoeias, witchcraft reports, zoology compendiums” and other oddities he keeps in his basement headquarters. Nine-Nails may be the colorful character in this partnership, but when he begins acting oddly, it’s Frey the skeptic who finds the courage to consult …yes, a bona fide witch.
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In This Tale of Online Intimacy, the Only Wise Characters Are Luddites
This content was originally published by KAITLIN PHILLIPS on 13 April 2017 | 9:00 pm.
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Credit
Miguel Porlan
SYMPATHY
By Olivia Sudjic
406 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $25.
The internet breeds low-level social paranoia among acquaintances (“She never ‘likes’ my posts”) and artificial security among complete randos (“I’m so glad we’re finally getting wasted IRL in this dark bar”). It allows us to project legitimate affection toward our loved ones (from the relationship status to the Valentine’s Day selfie), but it also allows for sudden repulsion syndrome (“unfollow”).
Olivia Sudjic’s smart debut novel, “Sympathy,” is an uncomfortably contemporary tale of unrequited love in the internet age. The narrator, Alice Hare, is an unemployed 23-year-old millennial. The novel takes the form of Alice’s memoir about slyly weaseling her way into a friendship with her internet idol, Mizuko. (“As with all her favorite things, I already knew what and where they were, so I mentioned it before she did.”) She believes their cosmic connection justifies her impropriety.
We feel for a character so starved for affection. Alice is an orphan unanchored by her adoptive parents, a missing theoretical physicist and the selfish, charismatic wife he left behind. Alice leaves England ostensibly to watch over her ailing but severe grandmother, Silvia, on the Upper East Side. (Silvia communicates via mailed letter; the only wise characters in the book are Luddites.) Really Alice is on a quest narrative for the creation myth that her willfully cryptic mother has denied her. “I wanted a single, coherent narrative to explain who I was and what it was I was supposed to be doing,” she explains. Wishing, perhaps, most acutely for a succinct, impressive Instagram bio.
Alice is awkward, adrift and portent-hungry — sympathy would be required to elevate the socially innocuous Alice to “our heroine.” (She loses her virginity quickly in New York, to an “innovation consultant” who “liked Steve Reich’s music, modern-art museums and Beat poetry.”) Alice is preoccupied with her disenfranchisement. At airports, she envies those who accidentally swap suitcases, their “futures altered, their lives entwined forever.”
Not unlike when Alice in Wonderland falls slowly “down, down, down” the rabbit hole — looking at “maps and pictures hung upon pegs” — Alice in “Sympathy” tumbles headfirst into a click hole about Mizuko, getting tingles “secretly looking at her like this, touching her pictures as I slid down, down, down while she slept.” She laps up Mizuko’s internet persona, “her reading material (Joan Didion) and her scented candle (Diptyque) and her shell-pink toenails perched on the gold taps at the end of the tub.”
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“Sympathy” is self-consciously clever, riddled with a network of allusions similar to that of Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” — also a story about a seemingly precocious girl with a missing father that could be mistaken for a particularly engaging young adult novel. The parallels with “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” are largely referential, and do not serve as what might have initially been an ambitious skeleton key for a book that sets itself up to be a novel of suspense — is Alice Hare a stalker? Is she dangerous? — only to dole out the infatuation as an episodic soap opera. Mizuko brushes Alice off New Yorker-style: “She repeated this reason for not spending the evening with me three more times that week. I couldn’t come because the three different hosts each had a very small table.” (Remember the Mad Hatter’s tea party: “The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: ‘No room! No room!’”)
Broken-heart syndrome is compounded by the peculiar emotional turbulence of digital heartbreak. When Alice steals Mizuko’s phone and starts scrolling, “my fingers felt like my feet once had from continuous walking in Manhattan — blistered and bleeding, having been unable to stop.” Mizuko is a writer and professor in Columbia’s M.F.A. program, and Alice commits the ultimate writerly betrayal, throwing Mizuko’s laptop into the Hudson. Finally, Alice must live with the metallic aftertaste of the “unfollow.” The Red Queen hypothesis — adapt or die — offers a particularly dour outlook for those who measure their pulse online. Alice never gains any Instagram followers. Her extinction is internet invisibility.
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In Praise of Agatha Christie’s Accidental Sleuths
This content was originally published by RADHIKA JONES on 13 April 2017 | 9:42 pm.
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“Evil Under the Sun” was my first. I liked the way Poirot insisted on his Belgianness in a world determined to mistake him for French. He’s a showman, with his flamboyant mustache and knife-edged bons mots, and he needs an audience; watch him gather the hotel guests to narrate the series of deceptions that led to the strangling of Arlena Marshall. Miss Marple, by contrast, sits and knits and claims to notice only what any reasonably observant, experienced person might. Her modesty belies not only her natural authority but also her extensive gardener’s knowledge of pesticides, so handy when your rural enclave is a magnet for homicide.
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Poirot is a professional, Miss Marple a professional amateur, but I have special affection for Christie’s accidental sleuths. They don’t start out with the presumption of omniscience; they struggle like the rest of us. In “The Secret Adversary” (1922), Christie introduces Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley, a young man and a young woman emerging, energetic and relatively unscathed, from World War I. They call each other “Old Thing” and “Old Bean,” but their combined ages, she writes, wouldn’t exceed 45. This entrepreneurial pair decide to earn a living by billing themselves as adventurers, and through strokes of luck and instinct, they help unmask a deep-state espionage ring. Beefy, ominous Russians loom large, as does a case of amnesia.
In her rendering of spycraft, Christie can’t touch John le Carré. But with Tommy and Tuppence, she hit on something different: a rare triumph of life-stage narrative. The two marry and feature in four more books, growing old in real time. “Partners in Crime” (1929) finds Tuppence six years after the wedding, discontented and longing for excitement. Their mentor, Mr. Carter, drafts them to run a detective agency, which they take on with what he fondly calls “excessive self-confidence.” In “N or M?” (1941), they are empty-nesters, written off as past their prime — until, once again, Mr. Carter steps in with an undercover assignment. In “By the Pricking of My Thumbs” (1968), they are grandparents. At this novel’s climax, Tuppence, closeted with an unlikely killer, has an epiphany: She realizes, simply and profoundly, that she is old. Lulled by the enduring sharpness of her mind, she has forgotten that her body is no longer that of the 20-something gamin who suffered chloroforming and kidnapping in the name of good mystery fun. It’s hard to blame her. I had forgotten, too.
Turn back the clock, then, to “Partners in Crime.” The charm of this collection of stories involves Christie’s sport with the genre. For each case, Tommy and Tuppence, avid readers of detective fiction, adopt the manner and method of one of their favorite sleuths — Sherlock Holmes, Thornley Colton, Father Brown — fitting character to crime with a fan’s delight. In the final chapter, Tommy imitates none other than “the great Poirot,” with Tuppence as Hastings, his amiable sidekick. “Partners in Crime” was published just nine years after Poirot made his debut in “The Mysterious Affair at Styles.” For Christie to declare her creation on a par with Sherlock Holmes — even as Tommy pokes fun at Poirot’s fastidiousness (“By the way, mon ami, can you not part your hair in the middle instead of one side? The present effect is unsymmetrical and deplorable”) — might be fondly attributed to excessive self-confidence. I think of it as a victory of brio. Poirot and Miss Marple would approve.
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A Christie Starter Kit
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Credit
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
“And Then There Were None” is Christie’s masterpiece, but for a slightly less canonical starting point, try these five:
‘THE SECRET ADVERSARY’ We meet Tommy and Tuppence, two charming amateur detectives. Tommy is the sensible one. Tuppence’s real name is Prudence, so she acts purely on impulse.
‘THE TUESDAY CLUB MURDERS’ It’s like a book club, except the participants tell stories of unsolved crimes to which they’ve been privy. Then Miss Marple solves them, while barely looking up from her knitting.
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‘ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE’ This is a mystery wrapped in a family saga inside a crime of passion. Put another way, a young man is cleared of the murder of his mother, which means that someone else in the household must have done it.
‘DEATH COMES AS THE END’ Christie was a born location scout (see “Murder on the Orient Express”); here she time-travels, too. This is set in ancient Egypt, as a killer picks off the family members of a wealthy priest, one by one.
‘SLEEPING MURDER’ What do you do if you unearth a murder 20 years old, one that nobody recognized as murder? According to the newlyweds Gwenda and Giles Reed, you investigate. Luckily, Miss Marple drops in to assist.
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Bana Alabed, seven-year-old Syrian peace campaigner, to publish memoir | Books
This content was originally published by Danuta Kean on 13 April 2017 | 1:53 pm.
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A seven-year-old Syrian refugee whose tweets from war-torn Aleppo won her a global following is set to write a book. Bana Alabed’s Dear World will recount her experiences in Syria and how she and her family rebuilt their lives as refugees. Simon & Schuster plans to publish it in the US this autumn.
The self-declared peace activist took to the social media network that made her name to announce the news. “I am happy to announce my book will be published by Simon & Schuster. The world must end all the wars now in every part of the world,” she tweeted to her 368,000 followers.
In a statement issued through her publisher, Bana added: “I hope my book will make the world do something for the children and people of Syria and bring peace to children all over the world who are living in war.”
Bana came to prominence in September 2016 after she began tweeting descriptions of her experiences of siege in the Syrian city. Documenting the impact of hunger, airstrikes and civil war, she caught the imagination of followers with her longing for a peaceful childhood and fear for the safety of herself and her family.
A Harry Potter fan, she received the ebook editions directly from JK Rowling after complaining that she could not get hold of physical copies of the books last November. In December, Rowling took part in a Twitter campaign #WhereisBana to put pressure on authorities to find the Alabed family after Bana’s online presence briefly went dark in December. It was later revealed that the family was being evacuated from Aleppo.
Bana has also used the account to plead for peace to Russian president Vladimir Putin, UK prime minister Theresa May, US president Barack Obama and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. At the end of the year, her family were allowed into Turkey, where they met the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and were given permission to remain.
Aleppo tweeter Bana Alabed meets Turkish president Erdogan – video
Likening her to Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, who was given refugee status in the UK after being shot in a horrific attack, S&S senior editor Christine Pride said: “Bana’s experiences and message transcend the headlines, and pierce through the political noise and debates, to remind us of the human cost of war and displacement.” The publisher will also launch a young readers’ edition under its Salaam Reads imprint.
Aided by her English-speaking mother Fatemah, the young activist courted controversy in February with a video addressed to US president Donald Trump about the travel ban. In the message, she asked if she now qualified as a terrorist and whether the president had ever gone hungry. However, her opposition to Trump did not extend to his recent airstrikes in Syria, for which she has tweeted her support.
Bana Alabed
(@AlabedBana)
I am a Syrian child who suffered under Bashar al Asad & Putin. I welcome Donald Trump action against the killers of my people.
There is no release scheduled for Britain thus far, but Simon & Schuster UK said negotiations were under way.
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Paperback Row
This content was originally published by JOUMANA KHATIB on 13 April 2017 | 10:26 pm.
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Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
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Bookstore News: April 13, 2017
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Amazon sets date to open Lynnfield, Mass., store; new kids store lands in North Carolina; Delaware LGBTQ store to close; and more.
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