Roy Miller's Blog, page 219
April 13, 2017
The Osage Indians Struck It Rich, Then Paid the Price
This content was originally published by DWIGHT GARNER on 12 April 2017 | 9:16 pm.
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That was a book with a personality. It seemed to be written by someone who was, as Charles Lamb said of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an archangel a little damaged. There was some strange junk in its cupboards.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” has cleaner lines, and it didn’t set its hooks in me in the same way. But the crime story it tells is appalling, and stocked with authentic heroes and villains. It will make you cringe at man’s inhumanity to man.
About America’s native people, Saul Bellow wrote in a 1957 essay, “They have left their bones, their flints and pots, their place names and tribal names and little besides except a stain, seldom vivid, on the consciousness of their white successors.”
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Patricia Wall/The New York Times
The best thing about Grann’s book is that it stares, hard, at that stain, and makes it vivid indeed.
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“Killers of the Flower Moon” describes how the Osage people were driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky portion of northwestern Oklahoma — out of sight, out of mind. It became apparent within a few decades, however, that immense oil deposits pooled below those Oklahoma rocks.
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The Osage people became wealthy from leasing their mineral rights; so wealthy that white America, stoked by a racist and sensationalistic press, went into a moral panic, a collective puritanical shudder.
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“Journalists told stories,” Grann writes, “often wildly embroidered, of Osage who discarded grand pianos on their lawns or replaced old cars with new ones after getting a flat tire.” A reporter from Harper’s Monthly Magazine wrote, ominously: “The Osage Indians are becoming so rich that something will have to be done about it.”
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The prison escapee Blackie Thompson after he was gunned down in 1934.Credit
Corbis
Something was done about it. The federal government appointed white guardians to monitor many of the Osage members’ spending habits. Even tiny purchases had to be authorized. The chicanery and graft were remarkable. Then things got worse.
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Tribe members began to be killed. They were, in the evocative words of a reporter at the time, “shot in lonely pastures, bored by steel as they sat in their automobiles, poisoned to die slowly, and dynamited as they slept in their homes.”
Few if any of these crimes were solved. Who cared about, Grann writes, using the intolerant lingo of the times, a “dead Injun”?
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These murders were an embarrassment for the still-green F.B.I., however. J. Edgar Hoover sent a former Texas Ranger, the perfectly named Tom White, to investigate. It was dangerous work, and White had steely nerves and the upright aplomb of Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men.”
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David GrannCredit
Matt Richman
“Killers of the Flower Moon” builds to a cinematic court scene filled with outrages and recantations. White gets his man, a local cattleman and a figure of genuine evil. But it is among Grann’s larger points that these murders were hardly the work of one human. It took a village — a “culture of killing,” in his words — to eliminate this many people.
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The government estimated that 24 Osage members were murdered. As Grann pores over the evidence, however, he realizes the number was almost certainly higher, perhaps in the hundreds.
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He spends time with the descendants of some of those killed, and he pokes through old files and turns up new information. His own outrage, though kept at a simmer, is unmistakable. “While researching the murders,” he writes, “I often felt that I was chasing history even as it was slipping away.”
The period photographs in “Killers of the Flower Moon” are exceptional in their impact; they bore into you. If the book has a heroine, it is an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart, whose sisters and other family members are picked off one by one. The beautiful and implacable faces of Mollie and her brown-eyed sisters gaze, as if in accusation, across the ages.
Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and always a welcome byline to find there. Reading his book reminded me that the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, once dreamed of starting a serious true-crime magazine he planned to call “Guilty?”
This never came to pass. Grann’s book investigates one painful splinter of America’s treatment of its native people, and it snips the question mark off Ross’s title.
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Successful Query: Margaret Rogers & An Enchantment of Ravens
This content was originally published by Brian A. Klems on 13 April 2017 | 4:00 pm.
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This post is part of a series called Successful Queries. It features actual query letter examples to literary agents that were successful for authors. In addition to the query letter, you’ll also see the thoughts from the writer’s literary agent as to why the letter worked. Today’s features debut author Margaret Rogerson and her agent Sara Megibow (KT Literary).
Margaret Rogerson
(left) writes fantasy for young adult readers. Her books draw inspiration from old fairy tales, because she loves stories in which the beautiful and the unsettling are sometimes indistinguishable. Her debut novel, AN ENCHANTMENT OF RAVENS, will be published in September 2017.
Sara Megibow (right) is a literary agent with nine years of experience in publishing. Sara specializes in working with authors in middle grade, young adult, romance, erotica, science fiction, and fantasy, and represents New York Times bestselling authors Roni Loren and Jason Hough and international bestselling authors Stefan Bachmann and Tiffany Reisz.
Margaret’s Query:
Dear Sara Megibow,
I am currently seeking representation for my YA fantasy AN ENCHANTMENT OF RAVENS, which is complete at 81,000 words.
Isobel is a prodigy portrait artist with a dangerous set of clients: the sinister fair folk, immortal creatures who cannot bake bread, weave cloth, or put a pen to paper without crumbling to dust. They crave human Craft with a terrible thirst, and barter their most glamorous and treacherous enchantments for Isobel’s work. She prides herself on resisting every temptation. But when she receives her first royal patron—Rook, the autumn prince—she paints mortal sorrow in his eyes. Devastated by the humanity she has inflicted upon him, he spirits her away to the autumnlands to stand trial for her crime.
Waylaid by the Wild Hunt’s ghostly hounds, the tainted influence of the Alder King, and hideous monsters risen from barrow mounds, Isobel and Rook depend on one another for survival. Their alliance blossoms into trust, then love, violating the fair folks’ ruthless Good Law. To save both their lives, Isobel must drink from the Green Well, whose water will transform her into a fair one—at the cost of her Craft, for immortality is as stagnant as it is timeless.
As the Alder King rouses from his slumber to hunt them down, Isobel faces a choice. She can sacrifice her talent for a guaranteed future, or arm herself with paint and canvas against the ancient power of the fairy courts. Because secretly, her Craft represents a threat the fair folk have never faced in all the millennia of their stale, unchanging lives: for the first time, her portraits have the power to make them feel.
The full or partial manuscript is available upon request. Thank you for your consideration!
Sincerely,
Margaret Rogerson
Commentary from Literary Agent Sara Megibow:
This query letter caught my attention right away because of its beautiful, sensual, lyrical language. And what a conflict! The query tells us that our heroine must choose between keeping her art or giving it up to live an immortal life with her beloved. To me, this reads as a story about a young woman learning to love while staying true to herself. That theme really calls to me as a feminist, a woman, a mother, and a lover of young adult literature. In short, this query presents the perfect combination of an intriguing story and superior craft.
Here are some elements of the pitch that stand out to me: First, we have a heroine who is a portrait artist. I love this! I see a lot of fantasy heroines who are assassins or princesses, but a painter? That’s really unique! Also, the inciting incident is beautiful and engaging—the heroine is taken to stand trial for the crime of painting mortal sorrow in the eyes of the autumn prince. Wonderful! Then, look at this amazing world building—the details are lush and gorgeous (just like the final cover of the book)—especially when we hear about the “terrible thirst” of the “sinister fair folk.” All in all the details here are stunning and the pitch captures the gothic feel of the story itself.
AN ENCHANTMENT OF RAVENS is a debut book by Margaret Rogerson—releasing September 26, 2017 from Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster. It’s not a series—this is a stand-alone work that will leave readers breathless with wonder. As with most of my clients, Margaret came to me via query slush pile, and from this query I asked to read the full manuscript. The rest is history—we signed together and sold the book shortly thereafter. Follow Margaret’s debut journey on her website: www.margaretrogerson.com.
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How to Write Your Life
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 12 April 2017 | 7:57 pm.
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Every life has drama: joy, loss, surprise, knowledge, conflict, wisdom — the stuff of a memoir. Writing yours can be a treasured gift to your children and grandchildren because it tells them something eloquent about who you are and who they are. It can also be a gift to yourself by providing the motivation to look back on your life with wisdom and experience, discovering yourself anew.
Start simple. Write about a trip you took, your first date or a teacher who changed your life. Other topics: your wedding or your divorce, the birth of a child, an illness, your grandmother, a friendship and a falling out. What you choose can be sad or funny, short or long. The only rule is that you choose a theme from your life and your heart. And that you start writing.
This guest post is by Babette Hughes. Hughes’s new book, The Secret of Happiness, is a compilation of her popular Huffington Post contributions. A Cleveland, Ohio native, Hughes is a bootlegger’s daughter whose father and uncle were murdered by the Mafia. Ms. Hughes is the co-author of Why College Students Fail and author of the memoir, Lost And Found. Her published columns, articles and book reviews can be found in the Saturday Review, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cleveland Magazine and the Cleveland Press. Babette and her husband are parents and stepparents to eight children and now reside in Austin, Texas.
As long as you’re not hurting anyone who is still alive, reveal family secrets. It is what your children and grandchildren want to know, it will bring your story to life and it can be an important cathartic experience for you.
And, let me encourage you: You remember more than you think you do. It’s all there in the recesses of your mind, and will return through the very process of writing. Writing is the trigger you use to release your memory. Don’t worry about precise names, places, facts and dates. It is the memory of your feeling and the incidents you have chosen to write about that can be truer, more significant, and more interesting than chronological facts (they can always be checked or reconstructed later).
Keep a notebook in your car, in your handbag, in your pocket and/or on your nightstand to record random memories and thoughts. It is important, because these flashes of memory or ideas can otherwise drift through your mind and vanish like a dream. Catch them and write them down.
Then set aside time during the day or evening to write. Write and write with no judgement about the results. Write and write freely and recklessly. Write and write even if you hate what you’ve come up with. Most professionals keep only about ten percent of what they produce, but they understand that writing the discarded ninety percent is how they will get to the buried memory, the treasure, the sentence or paragraph or passage that says what is in their heart and mind. It’s a wonderful feeling when it happens — like making a hole in one, hitting a grand slam, winning the lottery. It’s what keeps writers writing.
[The Big Lie of Age and Writing]
Think about your life as a play, with dialogue, and a cast of characters, and a setting. Events in your life have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Say you’re writing about your honeymoon trip to a resort. The two of you are having dinner in the dining room. A gentleman in a tuxedo is playing “Let’s Do It” on the piano. You describe the blue, fringed draperies on the windows. The Dover sole, wild rice and mushrooms on your plate. The mauve chiffon dress you are wearing from your trousseau. The aromas of your husband’s steak, your perfume, the red wine in your glass.
You notice a strange-looking man at the next table. He has a pock-marked face, icy blue eyes and white hair. He needs a shave. He is dining with a beautiful young woman in red lace. He is shouting and slamming his fist on the table as the beautiful young woman weeps.
Your new husband becomes so distressed that he cannot eat and insists on checking out of the hotel immediately and going home. Your marriage lasts only three more months. Your children never knew you had been married before. This is a scene.
What you write about doesn’t have to be that dramatic to be interesting, but you do want to lay the words on the page with as much detail as you can so that your readers can relive the scene that you are capturing.
Although someone else in your family may have experienced the same event or person in your story entirely differently, this is your memory, your truth and your experience. Perceptions are complicated and personal and singular, and the more you respect your own unique insight, the more fun you’ll have writing and the more your story will come to life on the page.
The writer and teacher, Brenda Ueland, says that you must write from your true self and not from the self you — or others — think you should. No individual is exactly like any other individual. No two identical persons have ever existed — including twins. Therefore, if you tell the truth and speak from your true self, you cannot help but have something important, unique and interesting to say that will be treasured for generations to come.
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Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
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2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 13
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 13 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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Recently, I recorded a “selfie” poem for my publisher Press 53. Click here to watch me recite “the silence between us” from my collection Solving the World’s Problems.
For today’s prompt, write a family poem. It could be about your family, someone else’s family, a big family, a small family. It could be about one person in the family or a group picture. Your call. Just write that poem.
*****
Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!
In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.
*****
Here’s my attempt at a Family Poem:
“as a parent”
as a parent there is no better time
than that spent with my family
whether the kids are getting along
or annoying each other it’s strange
how i look back on even the worst
moments with joy that i was able
to have those moments at all but
as a poet there is no better time
than those hours before & after
everyone in the house is awake
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). As a parent, he loves his family; as a poet, he loves the quiet moments when he can write.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
*****
Find more poetic posts here:
37 Common Poetry Terms.
Cywydd Llosgyrnach: Poetic Form.
Jaswinder Bolina: Poet Interview.
The post 2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 13 appeared first on WritersDigest.com.
The post 2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 13 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
April 12, 2017
New Y.A. Novels Tackle Crime and Its Consequences
This content was originally published by JEN DOLL on 12 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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There’s a serious twist. Her dad’s been on death row for five years for killing his best friend after a poker game gone wrong. He’s maintained his innocence — “Black man wrongly convicted on shady circumstantial evidence, officialdom’s long, hard stance on admitting no wrongdoing whatsoever because, hey, reasons,” Nikki explains, and now, mysterious new information has led to his release. But the joy is marred by an understanding that things will never be the same. Nikki realizes it’s up to her — along with her friends and maybe her crush, a boy with ties to a casino fortune — to figure out what’s going on.
Giles, a founding member of We Need Diverse Books and two-time Edgar Award finalist, is in top form, weaving together the threads of his whodunit-and-why and resonantly depicting his characters’ home and school lives. As a poker genius Nikki may be a singular sort of teenager, but she’s grounded in desires and motivations that make her story as moving as it is thrilling.
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THE MURDERER’S APE
Written and illustrated by Jakob Wegelius
Translated by Peter Graves
588 pp. Delacorte Press. $17.99.
(Young adult; ages 12 and up)
This may be the most charming book I’ve read all year. Its narrator, Sally Jones (“Human beings have two names, a first name and a surname, but I’m a gorilla and I just have the one name — Sally Jones,” she explains), is a gorilla who understands everything humans say, though she can’t herself speak. She can, however, write: The book begins with her pulling out a vintage typewriter she’s mended (Sally Jones is also a master fixer of things) in order to put her story down and, she hopes, overcome her nightmares.
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A lot has happened. Sally Jones’s best friend, the Chief, a man named Henry Koskela, was framed for a murder and sentenced to 25 years. In an effort to restore his reputation and reunite with her friend, Sally Jones embarks on a journey across the world: She’s in and out of homes and ships and even palaces, having adventures and relationships that are good and bad and complicated. (The Chief gives her the typewriter, so we know these two will find their way back to each other, but that doesn’t take away from the fun.)
Wegelius, a Swedish writer and illustrator, peppers his work with delightful drawings, and though the book is lengthy, its heart and mystery keep you turning pages. It’s a challenge to build a story around a protagonist who can’t speak, and Wegelius does this skillfully, emphasizing qualities that make us human — though not everyone demonstrates them — and that are possessed by Sally Jones, “a very good and fine person,” as the Chief aptly puts it.
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A LIST OF CAGES
By Robin Roe
310 pp. Disney-Hyperion. $17.99.
(Young adult; ages 12 and up)
Adam Blake is the sort of kid everybody likes, gregarious and smiling, even if he’s clumsy. “You’re sort of unbreakable,” his girlfriend tells him. A high school senior, he’s finally gotten the right treatment for his A.D.H.D., and he and his friends are cool yet mostly pretty nice.
Helping the school therapist, Adam encounters his former foster brother, Julian, now a freshman. Julian’s parents died in a car accident, and after his time with the Blakes an uncle took him in, cutting off ties with his foster family. Shy and dyslexic, Julian struggles at school, bullied by peers and teachers. Adam reaches out to Julian, inviting him to hang out and to sit with the seniors at lunch. Julian re-emerges from his shell, but he’s keeping terrifying secrets about what’s happening in his uncle’s home.
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This is Roe’s first young adult novel, and it’s impressive. Julian’s and Adam’s perspectives alternate, and the plot chugs steadily forward, moments of beauty and humor interspersed with scenes of abuse and violence. Roe runs a mentoring program for at-risk teens; it’s clear she brings firsthand experience to the subject. While the crimes she portrays are truly vile (and make for difficult reading), their evil can’t stand up to the goodness in her protagonists, and the lesson that every kindness matters — and that we always have the choice to be kind.
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DREAMLAND BURNING
By Jennifer Latham
371 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $18.99.
(Young adult; ages 12 and up)
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Seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase is just starting her summer when a skeleton is found on her property. A crime buff, Rowan can’t resist checking it out. “The dead always have stories to tell. They just need the living to listen,” she explains.
The story this skeleton tells is critical. In Tulsa, Okla., beginning on May 31, 1921, the city’s affluent African-American section — Greenwood, known as “black Wall Street” — was looted and burned to the ground by white rioters. Historians estimate that 300 people were killed, most of them black. Yet no white people faced charges, and as Latham writes in a note, “For more than 50 years, references to the riot were scrubbed from history books.”
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Latham hopes to remedy that omission with “Dreamland Burning,” which follows two biracial characters: Rowan, whose mom is black and dad is white, and Will Tillman, born to an Osage mother and a white father in the early 1900s. While Rowan tries to uncover the meaning of the skeleton — and experiences contemporary racism — Will sets the stage for the 1921 massacre, himself both victim and perpetrator of discrimination, though one who represents the possibility of understanding and change. Of course the skeleton and Will are linked, but how exactly will keep readers hanging in.
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CITY OF SAINTS AND THIEVES
By Natalie C. Anderson
401 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. $18.9
(Young adult; ages 12 and up)
Tina, or “Tiny Girl,” lives with vengeance in her heart. After escaping as refugees from war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, she and her mom thought they’d found safety in Kenya, and in her mom’s job as a maid to the powerful Greyhill family. Except that her mom had an affair with Roland Greyhill, and then was found murdered in his office.
Now living on the streets, Tina has become one of the best thieves in Sangui City, but she wants more: justice for her mother, and blood from the man she’s sure killed her, Roland Greyhill. She breaks into the office where her mom died looking for the information she needs — but her friend Michael, Greyhill’s son, appears.
“City of Saints and Thieves” is a twisty-turny, chock-full-of-secrets, so-exciting-you-have-to-force-yourself-to-take-breaks-and-breathe kind of novel. Anderson has worked for refugee relief agencies, and her novel has a clearly authentic foundation. Of course, the teenagers figuring out how to survive in this world in which adults so frequently fail them are the stars of the story, street-smart and savvy and searching. If occasionally Tina’s narrative voice seems a bit elevated for a girl who’s been living with a gang, her emotional journey feels compelling and true.
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A New Rule Book for the Great Game
This content was originally published by SERGE SCHMEMANN on 12 April 2017 | 11:00 am.
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Anne-Marie Slaughter
Credit
New America
THE CHESSBOARD AND THE WEB
Strategies of Connection in a Networked World
By Anne-Marie Slaughter
296 pp. Yale University Press. $26.
At the start of the 2015 Henry L. Stimson Lectures at Yale, on which this book is based, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a distinguished political scientist, authority on international law and now president of the New America think tank, explained that the topic came to her while she was serving as director of policy planning at the State Department — in effect while she was practicing what she had preached in her academic career. The time-honored exercise of international politics as a “great game,” an endless competition for strategic advantage among sovereign and equal powers, was in urgent need of a radical update for a world in which networks spawned by the internet and social media, both benign and malignant, were shaping a far different global order. “The Chessboard and the Web” is meant as a guide for foreign policy in this new world.
Whether in human interrelations or terrorism, efficient businesses or nefarious crime syndicates, government services or governments meddling in each other’s politics, Slaughter declares, we are at the dawn of a “Networked Age” when “all humanity is connected beneath the surface like the giant colonies of aspen trees in Colorado that are actually all one organism.” Yet foreign-policy makers, she argues, still play on the two-dimensional chessboard fashioned by the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia, partly because they lack the strategies for the web.
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The grand strategy she proposes is an international order based on three pillars: open society, open government and an open international system. Open versus closed, she declares, is the fault line of the digital age, the way capitalism versus Communism was in the last century. In the new order, in which competing states have been replaced by networks, openness means participation, transparency, autonomy and resistance to controls or limits on information.
Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, develops her ideas in a detailed journey through existing research and scholarship, guided by numerous charts and graphs, on how new technologies and ever-widening webs have affected the behavior of people and nations. The narrative is not always easy to follow, and I found myself longing for more concrete examples when confronting riffs like “A network strategy to build resilience across a society could start by searching for affiliation networks, with the idea that these repositories of social capital can be mobilized into civic capital.” But the fascinating complexity and consequence of the web that is enveloping the world certainly justifies a reader’s extra effort.
Slaughter’s government service was in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and her book was evidently completed before the 2016 presidential election (there is no mention of Donald Trump); the grand strategy she outlines is described as something the next president should adopt. Granted, the book is about a continuing global shift in international relations and not about the political movements du jour that have led to the election of President Trump or to the rise of authoritarian and nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere, yet on reading “The Chessboard and the Web” and listening on YouTube to the lectures Slaughter gave, I found myself repeatedly yearning to ask her how the grand strategy she advocates would apply to these political realities.
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Growing nationalism and authoritarianism, after all, are also in part consequences of the digital age and the echo chambers it has enabled, and if indeed the Networked Age is a clash of open and closed, many Americans and Europeans seem to be opting for closed in all the forms Slaughter outlines. That does not negate the need for a grand strategy of openness, of course, but exploring the consequences of choosing “closed” would make for a fascinating follow-up to a valuable study.
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Food Marks Milestones in These Culinary Collections
This content was originally published by MAX WATMAN on 12 April 2017 | 11:00 am.
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A YEAR RIGHT HERE
Adventures With Food and Family in the Great Nearby
By Jess Thomson 304 pp. University of Washington, $28.95
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When a friend visits Thomson’s hometown, Seattle, and posts an invigorating series of vacation shots, she sees for the first time that she’s ignoring the potential in her own backyard. Why would she joyfully buy lamb from little butcher shops while on vacation in Provence only to come home and ignore the fishermen selling crabs off the dock just across town? A. J. Liebling had to go to France to enjoy long lunches and good bottles of wine. These things are now available in her own ZIP code.
So Thomson makes the “Here List,” which includes a visit to the Okanagan Valley wine region in British Columbia, a weekend with the goats, cattle and sheep at a rural creamery and an evening at an extravagant restaurant on Washington’s Whidbey Island. She wants to shoot a deer, dig clams, hunt truffles, ride bikes — all the sorts of things we make excuses about and know in the back of our minds we should be doing instead of flopping down the same old timeworn paths. Our excuses will pale before Thomson’s. She has lupus, so riding a bike for miles and miles through those Canadian vineyards isn’t easy. Her young son has cerebral palsy, and although he comes across as dauntless and resilient, he too will find that many things aren’t easy. Like walking in sand.
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In a book so intimate — Thomson’s family, friends and husband are all in here — she needs to walk a very thin line, and she does it gracefully. She’s honest about people and their prickly selves. She doesn’t cover for them, but neither is she mean. Of course, things don’t go as planned. We all know what happens to the list you make at the start of the year. But if everything had gone according to plan, Thomson’s book would be as straightforward as her original list. The twists and turns are what makes it — that and a solid recipe for fried chicken.
MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and the Meaning of Life
By Peter Gethers
301 pp. Holt, $28.
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Gethers was having lunch with his mother at the famed Los Angeles restaurant Ma Maison shortly after Wolfgang Puck, then in his 20s, had taken over the kitchen. Judy Gethers loved the place, and when the owner, Patrick Terrail, came to sit with them, she asked how she might learn to cook such wonderful food. “Come to work in our kitchen three times a week,” Terrail replied. “We won’t pay you and you’ll basically be our slave, but after a year you’ll be a real French cook.”
While her son was still stifling a laugh, 53-year-old Judy agreed and began her powerful second act. She went on to write cookbooks, cook and teach. But in 2007 she had a massive stroke. Her resultant aphasia made it difficult to talk — unless the talk was about food. Asked to assess the duck she’s eating, she doesn’t miss a beat: “Very well cooked. Better today at room temperature. Outside crisp but moist inside. Maybe too much salt.”
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Gethers decides to learn to cook his mother’s favorite dishes, then cook them for her. This is no small task. While he says that “every major decision I’ve made and most key events in my life have revolved around food and drink,” he’s not very handy in the kitchen. (Or so he claims. He does all right working his way from the matzo brei from Ratner’s, which was owned by his mother’s family, up through Puck’s salmon coulibiac.)
At times, Gethers’s book seems trapped in another era — one where Wolfgang Puck is still young and nobody knows how to make mayonnaise from scratch or use a food processor. Maybe that’s just the nostalgic atmosphere created by the reprint of the Ratner’s menu, or maybe he’s willfully harking back to a time when his mother would still be demonstrating how to attach the top of a Cuisinart.
She’s pretty game, though, sipping her Château d’Yquem in a wheelchair. Their relationship has always been solid, and her son’s patience and love are wonderful to behold. “I don’t think food is a tool that can be manipulated to bring people together,” he writes. “I think food is usually an extension of the person preparing it. People connect to other people. Food is the pleasurable bridge upon which both sides cross.”
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Bill Cosby’s Books Join ‘Most Challenged’ List
This content was originally published by GRAHAM BOWLEY on 12 April 2017 | 7:15 pm.
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One of the titles in Bill Cosby’s “Little Bill” book series.
Credit
Scholastic
Bill Cosby’s “Little Bill” children’s book series was among the 10 “most challenged” books in 2016, according to a list compiled by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
A book is “challenged” when someone, like a parent or other community member, complains and tries to get the book removed from a library or a school curriculum.
It’s the first time the Cosby series has attracted a complaint, the organization said. The “Little Bill” books, first published in 1997, tell the adventures of Bill Jr., a 5-year-old Philadelphia boy, and were the basis for an animated TV series.
The series’ appearance on the list is unusual because it’s the first time since the office started to compile data in 1990 that a book made the list because of its author, rather than its contents.
The complaints arose because of the recent sexual allegations made against Mr. Cosby, according to the association.
Over the last few years, Mr. Cosby has faced accusations of sexual assault made by numerous women, which he denies. In June, he is to stand trial in Pennsylvania on sexual assault charges.
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The office reported 323 challenges to books last year, a slightly higher number than in 2015, many arising because of sexually explicit themes. The book that received the most complaints, “This One Summer,” by Mariko Tamaki, is a young adult graphic novel that was challenged because it “includes L.G.B.T. characters, drug use, and profanity, and it was considered sexually explicit with mature themes.”
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2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 12
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 12 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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Quick comment on comments: I don’t know that this will fix all problems related to commenting, but multiple poets have confirmed that some specific words seem to be keeping their poems from posting. Once they removed the words, the poems posted. Voila! So I looked into it, and there is a banned words/symbols list–to help block common spam language like profane words and specific drug names, but also words like “nude,” “sex,” “loan,” “debt,” and “thx.” Also, some weird symbols and the term “url.” If that helps anyone, great. If not, please let me know at robert.brewer@fwmedia.com.
For today’s prompt, write a guilty poem. The poem can be written from the perspective of someone who is (or feels) guilty, or it can be about someone (or something) else that’s guilty. But guilty of what? Cheating on a test? Or a spouse? Or a diet? Only you know, and only your poem can reveal the truth.
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Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!
In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.
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Here’s my attempt at a Guilty Poem:
“i imagine sometimes”
i imagine sometimes
what it would be like
to hold you close to me
& bring you near my lips
before biting into your
chocolate marshmallow
ice cream goodness
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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 guilty of enjoying the occasional ice cream cone. His favorite ice cream is a seasonal flavor offered by Young’s Dairy (outside of Yellow Springs, Ohio): Chocolate marshmallow. Mmmmm…
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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Find more poetic posts here:
37 Common Poetry Terms.
Cywydd Llosgyrnach: Poetic Form.
Jaswinder Bolina: Poet Interview.
The post 2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 12 appeared first on WritersDigest.com.
The post 2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 12 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
‘Locking Up Our Own,’ What Led to Mass Incarceration of Black Men
This content was originally published by JENNIFER SENIOR on 11 April 2017 | 9:46 pm.
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This is the exceptionally delicate question that he tries to answer, with exemplary nuance, over the course of his book. His approach is compassionate. Seldom does he reprimand the actors in this story for the choices they made.
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Instead, he opts for dramatic irony. When he discusses policy decisions first made in the 1970s, the audience knows what’s eventually coming — that a grossly disproportionate number of African-American men will become ensnared in the criminal justice system — but none of the players do. Not the clergy or the activists; not the police chiefs or the elected officials; not the newspaper columnists or the grieving parents. The legions of African-Americans who lobbied for more punitive measures to fight gun violence and drug dealing in their own neighborhoods didn’t know that their real-time responses to crises would result in the inhuman outcome of mass incarceration.
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A special 1979 issue of Ebony magazine addressing a crisis.
Credit
Ebony Magazine
The effect, for the reader, is devastating. It is also politically consequential. Conservatives could look at this book and complain, for example, that Michelle Alexander underemphasized black enthusiasm for stricter law enforcement in her influential best seller, “The New Jim Crow.” But it’s also possible, reading Forman’s work, to stand that argument on its head. One of the most cherished shibboleths of the right is that African-Americans complain about police brutality while conveniently overlooking the violence in their own neighborhoods.
“Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks,” Forman writes, “African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.”
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Forman does not minimize the influence of racism on mass incarceration. And he takes great pains to emphasize that African-Americans almost inevitably agitated for more than just law-enforcement solutions to the problems facing their neighborhoods — they argued for job and housing programs, improvements in education. But their timing in stumping for social programs was terrible. “Such efforts had become an object of ridicule by 1975, a symbol of the hopeless naïveté of 1960s liberalism,” Forman writes.
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[image error]The author James Forman Jr.
Credit
Harold Shapiro
One result: A wide range of African-American leaders championed tougher penalties for drug crimes and gun possession in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. It was the one option they consistently had, and it seemed a perfectly responsible, moral position. Wasn’t the safety of black law-abiding citizens a basic civil right?
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The list of those who voiced support for such measures may today seem surprising. It includes Maxine Waters, the current California congresswoman, back when she was a state assemblywoman, and Johnnie Cochran, when he was an assistant district attorney in Los Angeles. In 1988, when running for president, Jesse Jackson told The Chicago Tribune: “No one has the right to kill our children. I won’t take it from the Klan with a rope; I won’t take it from a neighbor with dope.”
Eric Holder, who would become Barack Obama’s attorney general, may have played the most astonishing role in escalating the war on crime. During the mid-90s, when he was the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, he started Operation Ceasefire, an initiative that gave Washington police wide latitude to stop cars and search them for guns. “I’m not going to be naïve about it,” Holder said at a community meeting in 1995. “The people who will be stopped will be young black males, overwhelmingly.”
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A mobile recruiting station in Oakland, Calif., in 1967.Credit
Oakland Police Department
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He knew the roots of crime were complex. He said so in interviews. But his immediate concern was reducing harm in the present.
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That Forman alights on Holder is not an accident. Part of the power of “Locking Up Our Own” is that it’s about Washington — not the swamp of deceit merchants and influence-peddlers that Donald J. Trump promised to drain, but a majority-black city that hundreds of thousands call home, regardless of whose bum is in the Oval Office. Washington only first got the chance to elect its own mayor and city council in 1975, and the city’s coming-of-age story — and the challenges it faced — in some ways mirrored that of other cities with large African-American populations, like Atlanta and Detroit.
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“Locking Up Our Own” is also very poignantly a book of the Obama era, when black authors like Alexander and Bryan Stevenson and Ta-Nehisi Coates initiated difficult conversations about racial justice and inequality, believing that their arguments might, for once, gain more meaningful traction. (Often, in fact, they said things the president, burdened with the duty to represent everyone, might not have felt free to say himself.)
Forman is a professor at Yale Law School and a co-founder of an alternative charter school for dropouts in Washington. (He’s also the son of the Civil Rights leader of the same name.) But it’s his six years as a public defender that seem most relevant to the sensibility of this book — and that give it a special halo, setting it apart. The stories he shares are not just carefully curated to make us think differently about criminal justice (though they will, particularly about that hallowed distinction between nonviolent drug offenders and everyone else); they are stories that made Forman himself think differently, and it’s in telling them that he sheds his cautious, measured self and becomes a brokenhearted, frustrated civil servant.
“So what?” he crankily replies, when a judge tells him his client is ineligible for a drug program because her attempts at rehab have failed in the past. “Our system,” he later writes, “never treated the failure of prison as a reason not to try more prison.”
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