Writers Voice » journalist

The Secret Arms Trade Between Israel & Apartheid South Africa

Francesca Rheannon — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:14:10 +0000

Sasha Polakow-Suransky

Writers Voice talks with Sasha Polakow-Suransky about his book, THE UNSPOKEN ALLIANCE. And, in an excerpt from our 2009 interview, Israeli journalist Amira Hass talks about her Holocaust survivor parents’ involvement in the Israeli peace movement.

As we produce this show, the World Cup Soccer games in South Africa are over and a new word has entered the American vocabulary — vuvuzela. But six decades ago, a much more sinister word came into our vocabulary from South Africa: apartheid. After decades of struggle, Black South Africans were able to overthrow the apartheid regime — an effort that was helped by an international embargo against trade with South Africa.

But not all countries observed the embargo. And some that claimed to, did not do so, in fact. One of them was Israel — and the lucrative trade it carried on with the apartheid regime was in weapons. The relationship extended to high level sharing of information and supplies for the secret nuclear weapons programs of both countries.

That’s what Sasha Polakow-Suransky shows in his controversial new book, THE UNSPOKEN ALLIANCE: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.

The day before the book was released, the Guardian published a story about top level secret documents Polakow-Suransky found revealing that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime. In response, Shimon Peres issued a denial. But the author stands by this and even more damning revelations that he uncovered through painstaking research and face-to-face interviews with key officials involved.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky is a senior editor of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. His writing has appeared in The American Prospect, the International Herald Tribune, The New Republic, and Newsweek.

Excerpt THE UNSPOKEN ALLIANCE

I spoke with Israeli journalist Amira Hass back in November of 2009 She was visiting the US on a tour to promote her mother’s diary of internment in Bergen Belsen during WWII (DIARY OF BERGEN BELSEN), which Hass edited. Both her parents were Holocaust survivors; after the war, they emigrated to Israel. Hass says the suffering her parents experienced during the holocaust made them very vulnerable to any suffering — and very attentive to the suffering of the Palestinians. They both became active in the Israeli peace movement.

In this excerpt from our 2009 interview, Hass says her mother felt deeply betrayed by what she saw as the use of the Holocaust by Israeli authorities to attack those who criticize their Palestinian policy. Her mother referred to it as ” the merchandizing of the Holocaust” and called for it to stop.

Listen to the entire 2009 interview

War & Women in Afghanistan

Francesca Rheannon — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:02:43 +0000

Ann Jones

With the firing this week of Stanley McChrystal as commander of the US-led forces in Iraq, it’s a good time to be reminded of the impact of the war on the civilian population — and especially on Afghani women.

In this archived show from March, 2010, journalist Ann Jones talks about women, the war in Afghanistan, and whether life is any better for its people since the US invaded their country.

Read the full article about this show from the original air date.

David Shenk on Genius & Genetics and David Chura on Kids in Lockup

Francesca Rheannon — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:15:43 +0000

David Shenk

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with journalist David Shenk about THE GENIUS IN ALL OF US: Why Everything We’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Are Wrong. It’s about what the science of epigenetics is telling us us about the potential for human achievement. And David Chura talks about his memoir of teaching incarcerated adolescents, I DON’T WISH NOBODY TO HAVE A LIFE LIKE MINE: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. He says the War on Crime is a war on kids.

Child prodigies like YoYo Ma, Mozart, or Tiger Woods are born, not made, right? They just got lucky in the genetic lottery, while the rest of us have to be satisfied with mediocrity or, at best, the modest achievements we can reach by dint of hard work.

Not so fast, says David Shenk in his new book, THE GENIUS IN ALL OF US. He says everything we’ve been told about genetics, talent, and IQ are wrong. He says, new science is showing that great achievement isn’t about what’s in the genes. It’s about how the environment influences genetic information — and that information can be changed by dedication, practice, and ambition.

Shenk is the bestselling author of five previous books, including The Forgetting and Data Smog, and has written for The Atlantic.com, National Geographic, Slate, Harper’s, among other venues.

Web Extra: Shenk reads a section from his book about the baseball player Ted Williams.

David Chura

David Chura spent 10 years teaching students being held in adult jails for crimes ranging from drug sales to assault. He says the War on Crime is all too often a war on kids, one that neglects the environment in which his students were raised. The young men he taught were the victims of abuse, poverty, and neglect. Yet, despite their histories, they are capable of compassion, enthusiasm for learning, and joy. Chura brings their stories to life in his book, I DON’T WISH NOBODY TO HAVE A LIFE LIKE MINE.

Read an excerpt

Tales of Secrecy & Obsession

Francesca Rheannon — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:43:35 +0000

David Grann

We spend the hour with journalist David Grann, talking about his latest book THE DEVIL AND SHERLOCK HOLMES: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession and his first book, THE LOST CITY OF Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything man could invent”, Sherlock Holmes once said. The strangeness of life is at the heart of journalist David Grann’s new book THE DEVIL AND SHERLOCK HOLMES: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession. It’s a collection of 12 true stories. In them, Grann unlocks the mystery behind the murder of a Sherlock Holmes expert, goes with sandhogs into the depths under New York City’s streets to warn about a terrifying threat to the city’s water supply; he reports on the infiltration of the Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system. And he recounts the strange fate of Toto Constant, a leader of the Haitian death squads – and a man called “the devil” by Haitian refugees.

David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He’s previously written for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, among others.

We also hear part of our 2009 interview with David Grann about his last book, THE LOST CITY OF Z . It’s being made into a movie starring Brad Pitt as Percy Fawcett, the explorer who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925, looking for the ruins of a lost civilization in the heart of the Amazon jungle.

Is Life Any Better for Women in Afghanistan?

Francesca Rheannon — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:36:46 +0000

Ann Jones

Journalist Ann Jones talks about Afghani women, the war in Afghanistan, and whether life is any better for its people since the US invaded their country.

Many people thought that when the U.S. got involved in Afghanistan, the position of Afghani women would improve. That position is something award-winning U.S. journalist and women’s rights activist Ann Jones knows a lot about. Soon after the U.S. bombing of the capital, Kabul, she went to the city to bring help where her country had brought destruction. Jones worked with war widows, trained English teachers and investigated conditions at Kabul’s prison for women. Her trenchant report, KABUL IN WINTER: Life Without Peace In Afghanistan, was published in 2006.

Since then, she’s continued to visit and write about Afghanistan, and in particular the position of Afghani women.

Jones says the position of most women in Afghanistan, brutal under the Taliban, has actually gotten worse since the Taliban were overthrown. Partly that’s because of the impact of the war and partly because the US backed Karzai government has instituted policies that undermine women’s basic civil and human rights, such as the Shi’a Family Law, called the marital rape law by the international press. Jones also talks about the brave resistance of Afghan women to the oppression they face in their country.

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Back in 2006, we spoke to Ann Jones about her book KABUL IN WINTER: Life Without Peace In Afghanistan. She went there right after the US bombing of Kabul. Impressively researched, it is also a powerful personal take on what she found. We air part of that interview on today’s show.

Ann Jones will be speaking this Thursday, 3/25, 7:30, in Parish Hall, Grace Church, in Amherst. Her talk is sponsored by Alliance for Justice.

Wars of Islamic Succession and Partners in Health in Haiti

Francesca Rheannon — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:27:24 +0000

Tracy Kidder

Laurie Hazleton

Journalist Lesley Hazleton talks about AFTER THE PROPHET. It’s about the wars of succession after Mohammed’s death that led to the split between Shia and Sunni. And author Tracy Kidder talks about Haiti, Dr. Paul Farmer, and the organization Farmer founded, Partners in Health. Kidder’s book is MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS, published in 2003.

After the Prophet

As the prophet Mohammed lay on his death bed in 632 AD, the plotting about who would succeed him swirled around his prostrate form. The wars of succession that ensued are still going on today, in the split between Shia and Sunni. Yet Islam was a religion founded on an ideal of unity — unity that, my guest Lesley Hazleton says, was undermined by human folly. Her fascinating book, chronicles the bloody history of this folly — the tensions, jealousies and power plays that followed on the heels of Mohammed’s death.

Hazleton is a psychologist and journalist who writes about the intertwining of religion and politics in the Middle East. In addition to AFTER THE PROPHET, she’s the author of and CORRECTION: In the audio, Lesley Hazleton is mis-named “Laurie” by host Francesca Rheannon.

Partners In Health in Haiti

Partners In Health

The heartrending scenes out of Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake are spurring Americans to open their pocketbooks and give to the relief effort. One of the best places to give is to the organization Partners In Health, which has been bringing health services to the poorest people in Haiti for more than 20 years. It does this by training local doctors and medical workers, and by listening to the people it serves to find out what they need and how best to give it. P.I.H. serves some 1.5 million people in Haiti’s rural areas.

It has so gained the trust and respect of Haitians and the international community alike, that it has been tasked with leading one of the largest medical operations for earthquake victims, at Port au Prince’s Central Hospital. It is coordinating care of critically injured Haitians with the US Navy hospital ship Comfort and running 24 different operating rooms round the clock.

Partners in Health was founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard-educated anthropologist who traveled to Haiti to write his thesis in anthropology and ended up deciding to become a doctor to serve the people he had come to know in that desperately poor country. Farmer and Partners in Health are the subject of Tracy Kidder’s 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. Farmer has been named the UN’s Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti and is expected to be instrumental in Haiti’s reconstruction efforts.

Tracy Kidder is the author of numerous books, including Among Schoolchildren. He’s spoken to Writers Voice about his memoir, My Detachment, and his most recent book, Strength in What Remains.

The Will To Resist

Francesca Rheannon — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:15:28 +0000

Dahr Jamail

“Unembedded journalist” Dahr Jamail tells us about the profound impact on veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — and how they are fighting back. We also talk with mystery novelist Lisa Kleinholz, cookbook author Lora Brody and journalism prof and blogger B.J. Roche – they’re all panelists on the upcoming Write Angles writers conference taking place Nov 21, 2009 at Mount Holyoke College.

An Unembedded Journalist

Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan was about to be deployed to Iraq when he took the lives of thirteen people at Fort Hood earlier this month. He’d seen the effects of the war firsthand counseling veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. Rather than go to Iraq, he planned to die along with those he murdered Fort Hood suspect said his goodbyes before rampage. Though some suspect a Muslim extremist motive for the shootings, it’s telling that eighteen U.S. war veterans commit suicide every day. The toll is even higher for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dahr Jamail’s first book, , looked at the devastation of the war in Iraq on Iraqi civilians. Now this unembedded journalist has come out with . The book is about how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are affecting veterans who have come back home. They suffer from PTSD from battle, but also from sexual violence (against women soldiers), the failures of the veteran’s system, and continual redeployments. As a result, he says more soldiers are dying by suicide than are killed in combat.

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Some soldiers are fighting back – not through violence, but through political resistance, by talking with fellow soldiers, and even by fleeing the country. They’re also trying to make sure that other troops don’t have to go through what they did. Dahr Jamail writes of their courageous opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His book gives us insight into how the horrors of war can affect the human soul.

Write Angles

For the last 22 years our region has played host to Write Angles, a terrific writers conference. Francesca caught up with a few of the panelists to give you a preview.

Lora Brody is the bestselling author of 18 cookbooks, among them and, . She’s even got a cookbook about broccoli, which takes certain amount of courage. I caught up with her by phone in France’s beautiful southwestern region, the Dordogne, where she was leading her annual cooking tour.

Links

Mystery writer Lisa Kleinholz is author of the Zoe Szabo mysteries, about a punk-rock journalist sleuth in rural New England. She started out by wanting to write regular fiction, but found it difficult to sell her first book. So she tried her hand at mystery writing and her career took off.

Links

Read an excerpt from Lisa Kleinholz’ Exiles on Main Street.
Read an excerpt from Lisa Kleinholz’ Dancing With Mr. D.

Our last Write Angles conference panelist is UMass journalism professor, BJ Roche. She was a correspondent and columnist for the Boston Globe before becoming a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and an online publisher. We invited her on to talk about online publishing. Her own blog, fiftyshift.com, is for, by and about women over 40.

Find out about the fiftyshift.com booklet Friends Indeed.

Lora Brody, Lisa Kleinholz and B.J. Roche will be speaking on their respective genre panels at the WA conference at the Willits Hallowell Center on the campus of MHC, November 21.

Diaries of Disaster

Francesca Rheannon — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:06:55 +0000

Amira Hass

Francine Prose

Francine Prose talks about her terrific new book, ANNE FRANK: THE BOOK, THE LIFE, THE AFTERLIFE. It shines a writer’s lens on Frank’s diary and on its postwar reception in the U.S. and elsewhere. And Israeli journalist Amira Hass tells us about her mother’s DIARY OF BERGEN BELSEN, a searing account of moral courage in the face of unrelenting brutality.

Most years at this time I air a program commemorating the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht. That was the anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria that took place on November 9 and 10, 1938. For those Jews who had tried to convince themselves that the Nazis were more bark than bite, the pogrom was a wake-up call — but one that came too late for most. By 1938, it was difficult to get a visa to a safe country of refuge.

Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, was much more farsighted than most German Jews. Already by 1933, he had moved himself and his wife and two daughters to Holland. But in 1940, the Germans overran the Netherlands and Otto knew he had to once again plan for his family’s safety. The story of their move to the Annex – a hidden wing over Frank’s business on one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals – has come to us through the words of his gifted and doomed daughter, Anne. Otto was the only one of the four to survive deportation to the camps.

Francine Prose is a writer’s writer. In addition to fiction, she’s written about other writers, most notably in her book , which we interviewed her about on this show. Now she’s turned her attention to the diary of Anne Frank and how it has been seen since it was published. She says over the course of her time in the Annex, Anne became an extraordinarily accomplished writer, using literary devices like addressing the diary to an imaginary friend, Kitty, and reworking earlier passages to make them tighter and more compelling. Francine Prose’s new book is .

Listen to Francine Prose’s other interviews on Writer’s Voice:

on READING LIKE A WRITER
on her novel GOLDENGROVE

When Israeli journalist Amira Hass was growing up, there were a few stories her mother told her about her experience in the Nazi concentration camp Bergen Belsen — like the one about how her mother, Hannah Levy-Hass, helped organize the women in her barracks to demand an equal sharing out of the meager portions of watery soup they were allotted. Designed to break the grip of the kapos, or prisoner deputies of the Nazi authorities, the strike won its objective and no doubt saved the lives of some of the women inmates.

“When we speak about suffering…my parent’s experience made them very vulnerable to any suffering, very attentive to the suffering of the Palestinians.”

But Hass never learned the whole story of her mother’s internment until she read her Hannah Ley-Hass’s diary of Bergen Belsen. Published now in English, the book has a forward and afterword written by her daughter. It’s a searing tale of extreme deprivation, starvation and brutality. But also of the undaunted courage of one young woman who kept faith with her moral convictions in spite of soul-crushing circumstances.

Amira Hass is renowned for her newspaper columns on the conditions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. She works for the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz and lives in Gaza. Both her parents are Holocaust survivors – and both were longtime activists in opposing Israeli government policy toward Palestinians.

Amira Hass is the recipient of the International Women’s Media Foundation 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award for her bravery in being an Israeli citizen who lives and reports from Gaza.

Links

Dying for the Story and Living Better on Less

Francesca Rheannon — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:12:36 +0000

Wanda Urbanska

Terry Gould

Investigative journalist Terry Gould talks about his book, MARKED FOR DEATH: Dying for the Story in the World’s Most Dangerous Places. It explores the stories of seven journalists who exposed the truth — even though they knew they’d be killed for their work. And Wanda Urbanska of the TV show Simple Living tells us the secret of genuine happiness. She edited LESS IS MORE with Cecile Andrews.

Journalism As An Act of Courage

At least thirty two journalists were killed in 2009 while reporting dangerous stories in dangerous places. Since 1992, 758 journalists have been killed on the job. Contrary to common assumptions, most of them — 85% — were not foreigners working in country as war correspondents. Instead, they were local journalists exposing official corruption in their own communities.

Terry Gould says those communities are most often in countries where corruption is embedded in the formal structure of government — places like Russia, Colombia, the Philippines and Bangla Desh. There, lawlessness takes place within the law, the system of organized crime is locked into the business of the nation — and journalists are murdered with impunity. Ninety five per cent of the people who ordered their murders remain unpunished.

“While a lot of these journalists had been targeted beforehand, they persisted in their story, knowing they would almost certainly be killed for doing so. And I wondered who these amazing people were.”

The seven journalists Gould profiles in his new book, knew they would be killed. Yet they persisted. More than that, they were willing to give their lives defending the common people against the powerful interests that preyed on them.

Terry Gould wanted to know what made these journalists tick, what “psychology of sacrifice” drove them to persist in their investigations — people like Anna Politovskaya of Russia. She was murdered the very day Gould was on his way to interview her about the killings of two other Russian journalists. He found her and most of the other journalists he profiled to be deeply flawed, if incredibly courageous, individuals — all except the saintly Manik Saha of Bangla Desh, who was motivated by his own scientific theory of goodness.

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Gould has been following organized crime throughout his long career as an investigative journalist. He is also the author of as well as other books and numerous articles. He won the Singh Hayer Award for Bravery in Journalism, sponsored by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

His book, MARKED FOR DEATH takes its title from a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a NY-based organization that keeps track of press freedom abuses around the world and lobbies on behalf of threatened journalists.

Read an except about Manik Saha from Terry Gould’s MARKED FOR DEATH

Watch a video clip of Gould talking about the book.

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Less is More?

What makes us happy? That question is answered by a host of writers in a new book co-edited by guest Wanda Urbanska. She says genuine happiness comes from having more time and downshifting to a lower consumption, more satisfying lifestyle. The book she co-edited, , counts among its contributors Bill McKibben, author of DEEP ECONOMY, Ernst Callenbach who wrote the 1970’s classic ECOTOPIA, John de Graaf of AFFLUENZA, and Juliet Schor, author of THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN and its sequel, THE OVERSPENT AMERICAN.

Wanda Urbanska hosts the TV show Simple Living. Her co-editor, Cecile Andrews, wrote the book SLOW IS BEAUTIFUL and is co-founder of Phinney Ecovillage in Seattle.

Empires of Illusion, Empires of Torture

Francesca Rheannon — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:50:11 +0000

Chris Pyle

Chris Hedges

Journalist Chris Hedges talks about EMPIRE OF ILLUSION: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. He says Americans are in thrall to a culture of narcissism, revenge, and fake “happiness” that is destroying our democracy – and our power to connect genuinely with others. And former Army intelligence officer and constitutional scholar Chris Pyle says the Bush Administration is GETTING AWAY WITH TORTURE. He tells us about secret government, war crimes, and the rule of law.

Empire of Illusion

Are you pessimistic about the future? Are economic woes, climate chaos, the capture of Washington by special interests and a host of other nail-biting problems in the reality-based universe getting you down?

Well, rather than doing something about it, why don’t you just sit back and forgot your worries by watching World Wide Wrestling, Jerry Springer, a gonzo porn video, or, for that matter, a PBS marathon with Deepak Chopra on how we can all be happy if we just think happy thoughts?

Pulitzer prize-winner Chris Hedges examines America’s turn from reality to illusion in his new book, . He examines five areas of illusion: in literacy, love, wisdom, happiness and our idea of America. He says that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are a dangerous pablum that’s sapping our ability to solve real problems. And, meanwhile, while “Brand” Obama exhorts us that “Yes, We Can”, American democracy is crumbling under our feet. Driven by corporate greed and domination, the spectacle society Hedges explores is, he says, creating a kind of “inverted totalitarianism” that exploits violence, pornography, and the anodyne nostrums of “positive psychology” to numb or lull us into passivity.

[sniplet amazon bookstore widget]

Listen to the extended interview with Hedges on threat and hope here.

A former Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and divinity school graduate, Hedges is also the author of numerous books, including the bestseller, . He is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and writes for Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and Mother Jones. He is also a columnist for Truthdig.com.

Getting Away With Torture

The U.S. used to be the refuge for people fleeing human rights threats from dictatorial regimes abroad. America held herself up as an example of respect for law and human rights. No more. Under the Bush Administration (although it started earlier) human rights crimes like kidnapping, torture, and imprisonment without charges spread their stain on American policy and reputation.

If you want to get a full picture of how the Bush torture policy was devised and executed, you need go no farther than Chris Pyle’s new book, . From George Bush and Dick Cheney to George Tenet and Albert Gonzales, the torture policy was created and promoted with obsessive attention to detail. The “bad apples” of Abu Ghraib reached into the highest levels of the U.S. government. Not only that, it didn’t work to make us safer; quite the opposite.

“This was not something that went on out in the field by angry soldiers who had lost comrades. It was so closely supervised, the lawyers were consulted to justify techniques that under American law had always been considered absolutely forbidden…”

Pyle knows a lot about how the US government violates the rule of law. A former Army intelligence officer, in 1970 he blew the whistle on the military’s domestic spying on civilians in the civil rights and antiwar movements. He served as an investigator on the Church Committee investigating the spying. That led to laws limiting domestic military surveillance; laws that were undermined under the Bush administration.

Pyle is a constitutional scholar, whose previous books include . We talked to him about the latter in 2006. He teaches constitutional law at Mount Holyoke College. In Getting Away With Torture, he brings all the evidence together to paint a fascinating portrait of how the war on terror – and the drive for revenge – has undermined our basic civil freedoms.

Looking at New York City, Before and After 9/11

Francesca Rheannon — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 03:25:52 +0000

Max Page

Patrick Radden Keefe

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with architectural historian Max Page about . And journalist Patrick Radden Keefe tells us the story of China’s outmigration to New York in the 1980′s and the “snakeheads” who facilitated and exploited it. His book is .

This week marks the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. But before Al Qaeda’s jets crashed into the twin towers in the real world, millions of players of the software game Flight Simulator had crashed their fantasy jets into the same towers for years. Before that, King Kong threatened the Empire State Building. New York has been destroyed by flood, a sudden ice age, aliens from other planets, anarchists and immigrants and nuclear war — all in the imagination of American writers, filmmakers, and artists. What is it about the New York that excites such fantasies of destruction? That’s what Max Page explores in his gorgeously illustrated book THE CITY’S END: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction.

Page says, “each era has found it useful to destroy New York in its own particular way.” He links fantasies of “the City’s end” to fears about immigration, modernity, and technology, as well as love for and homage to New York.

Max Page teaches history and architecture at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

LINKS

NYT review
Alexis Rockman, Manifest Destiny
Download Caesar’s Column at Project Gutenberg
The Day After Tomorrow trailer

The US is a country of immigrants, yet ever since the 9/11 attacks, life has become increasingly precarious for them, especially if they came here illegally: thrown into jail, summarily deported, sometimes denied due process of law. But such harsh policies didn’t begin with 9/11. They began under the Clinton Administration, with the shipwreck on the shores of New York of the Golden Venture. The ship was carrying Chinese migrants from Fujian Province. Ten of the migrants died during their six month journey to America.

The wave of immigration from Fujian was facilitated by the so-called “snakeheads” of Chinatown. They smuggled people into New York in return for a hefty fee of thousands. Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe uncovers their story in his book, THE SNAKEHEAD: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream.

In addition to THE SNAKEHEAD, he’s also author of .

LINKS

Food Security and Insecurity

Francesca Rheannon — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:11:53 +0000

Robin Wheeler

Sasha Abramsky

We talk with journalist Sasha Abramsky about his new book . And sustainability expert Robin Wheeler talks about her book, .

Do you know where your next meal is coming from? For a staggering 25 million Americans the local food pantry is their source for putting food on the table. The general recession has hidden the ongoing problem of hunger; while everyone might be feeling the money crunch, for too many there is no food to bite into. This year there was a more than 20% increase in the use of food stamps to 34.9 million Americans (one in nine), 14 million American children are in danger of going hungry everyday.

Sasha Abramsky’s new book Breadline USA chronicles this daily struggle to eat. the author reports from communities like Siskiyou, CA, where 50% of the population is on food stamps. He even put himself through an experiment of what it’s like to have to live on a paycheck that barely breaks the minimum wage. Abramsky exposes the surprising connections between such things as high gas prices with hunger. But the author hasn’t left his readers banging the refrigerator door in frustration, he offers down to earth solutions for this devastating problem.

Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow with Demos, a progressive think tank in New York. His other books are CONNED andAMERICAN FURIES. His next book, Inside Obama’s Brain, will be out this December. We’ll talk to him again when it’s published.

Read Abramsky on Breadline USA in the Huffington Post

While Sasha Abramsky’s book focuses on the food insecurity facing the poor, sustainability expert Robin Wheeler believes we all face the potential of being food insecure. In FOOD SECURITY FOR THE FAINT OF HEART, she points out that our global food supply chains are extremely vulnerable. Disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes can wipe out months of stored food when the power goes out, pandemic flu could shut down international trade, plant diseases could wipe out major food crops. And then there’s climate change: when we called Robin Wheeler at her home in British Columbia, she told us her community was facing a severe — and uncharacteristic — drought.

In her book, Wheeler helps the reader understand how to become more food secure in the face of these challenges. It covers preserving garden food, saving freezer food during a power outage, managing through natural disasters, preparing quick herbal medicinals, and foraging for wild food.

Read an excerpt from FOOD SECURITY FOR THE FAINT AT HEART

Ron Suskind, THE WAY OF THE WORLD and ELIZABETH WINTHROP, COUNTING ON GRACE

Francesca Rheannon — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 01:39:53 +0000

Elizabeth Winthrop

Ron Suskind

Francesca talks with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind about . Also, Elizabeth Winthrop on , the story of an 11-year old girl working in the textile mills of Vermont at the turn of the twentieth century.

Ron Suskind‘s THE WAY OF THE WORLD is chock-full of shocking revelations about US policy on war and terrorism under the Bush Administration.

Read an excerpt from WAY OF THE WORLD about Usman Khosa.

But the book is about much more than revelations. It’s about finding “the human solution” to the grave crises we face in this world.

Elizabeth Winthrop paints a vivid portrait of the plight of child laborers in the New England textile mills in the early 1900′s. She bases her main character, Grace, on the photograph by Lewis Hine of a young girl posed in front of her machine. While writing the book, Winthrop went in search of the real person behind the photo and found out the remarkable story of Addie Card.

To hear about Winthrop’s discovery of Addie Card, listen to the Web exclusive extended interview.

David Cay Johnston, FREE LUNCH

Francesca Rheannon — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:16:17 +0000

Francine Prose

David Cay Johnston

Francesca interviews reporter David Cay Johnston about his investigation into how government policy is rigged to enrich the super wealthy. And Francine Prose talks about GOLDENGROVE, her new coming-of-age novel.

The financial meltdown on Wall Street has many people asking how the government can find hundreds of billions of dollars to bailout the guys who brought us this mess, but always claims there’s no money for universal health care, foreclosure assistance, schools, or the environment?

David Cay Johnston says it’s all part of an endemic pattern of “corporate welfare”, where the spoils of government revenue go to the rich and rest of us end up poorer. Johnston was an investigative journalist for the New York Times for many years. His beat was taxation and he won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code. His first book on the subject was Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else.

His latest book is .

Writer’s Voice last spoke to author Francine Prose in 2006 about her bestselling nonfiction book, . Although she’s written several other works of nonfiction, Prose is best known as a novelist who usually treats her characters with an unsparing pen. But her new novel is a poignant and compassionate tale of dealing with the loss of a loved one. Prose wrote it as she was mourning the death of her own mother.

The novel takes the reader into the mind of Nico, a thirteen year old girl who is struggling to come to terms with the death of her older sister by drowning. Her grieving parents are little help, overwhelmed as they are by their own grief. Instead, Nico turns to her sister’s boyfriend, a high school senior. Their budding friendship brings a measure of healing–and danger–to Nico, as she negotiates her emerging sense of self.

Francine Prose is the author of thirteen novels, as well as short stories, nonfiction books and a children’s book. She’s the president of PEN American Center.

T.J. English, HAVANA NOCTURNE and Marisa Silver, GOD OF WAR

Francesca Rheannon — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:52:18 +0000

T J English

Francesca talks with journalist T. J. English about the Mafia’s Cuba experiment, the parallels between the Mob and legal capitalism, and the role Mob activities played in spurring the Cuban Revolution into being. His bestselling book is HAVANA NOCTURNE: How the Mob owned Cuba…and Then Lost It to the Revolution.

Marisa Silver

Also, Marisa Silver tells us about her haunting novel, THE GOD OF WAR. Set in the arid landscape by the Salton Sea of California, GOD OF WAR is a powerful coming-of-age novel about a boy who confronts the need to balance his responsibility to his family with his emerging sense of self.

“Marisa Silver’s The God of War is a novel of great metaphorical depth and beauty. It stays with you like a lesson well and truly learned.” — Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls

Read an excerpt from GOD OF WAR

Toxic Cosmetics

Francesca Rheannon — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 23:45:19 +0000

Francesca talks first with Stacy Malkan about NOT JUST A PRETTY FACE: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry. She’s communications director of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and admitted former teenage make-up diva.

The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

Francesca Rheannon — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:31:57 +0000

Jeff Sharlet

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with journalist Jeff Sharlet about his bestselling new book, . It’s about the real “New World Order” of elite fundamentalism that threatens our democracy.

It’s all in the family

When Senator Sam Brownback ran for president during the recent primary season few people knew that he’s a member of an elite fundamentalist group that’s waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. It’s called The Family. It counts not just conservatives but also liberals like Hillary Clinton among its intimates and fellow travelers. When the National Prayer Breakfast is held each year–it’s organized by the Family. When we say “our nation, under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, or we read “In God we Trust” on our greenbacks–that’s because of the Family.

Founded during the Great Depression in 1933, the Family preaches a gospel of “biblical capitalism,” military might, and American empire. It’s played a crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the harsh economics of globalization. That’s what journalist Jeff Sharlet says in his new book, THE FAMILY: THE ELITE FUNDAMENTALISM AT THE HEART OF AMERICAN POWER.

[sniplet amazon bookstore widget]

Jeff Sharlet’s previous book was , which he co-authored with Peter Manseau. He’s a contributing editor for Harper’s and Rolling Stone. His Mother Jones article about Hillary Clinton’s cozy relationship with Christian fundamentalists, “Hillary’s Prayer”, can be read here.

Read an excerpt from THE FAMILY here.

Anthony Lewis on the First Amendment

Francesca Rheannon — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:26:51 +0000

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Lewis about his pithy and thought-provoking “biography” of the First Amendment, FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT WE HATE.

THE HAKAWATI and SO WRONG FOR SO LONG

Francesca Rheannon — Wed, 21 May 2008 00:57:10 +0000

Rabih Alameddine

We talk with Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine about his new novel, . Framed around the story of a family in modern-day Lebanon, the novel weaves fiction, fable and epic into a wonderful tapestry.

And journalist and editor Greg Mitchell tells us about how the press and the punditocracy failed the public on Iraq. His book is .

Norman Solomon and Valerie Martin

Francesca Rheannon — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:58:25 +0000

Valerie Martin

Normon Solomon

We talk with veteran journalist and commentator Normon Solomon about his memoir, .

Read an excerpt of his book here.

Also, we talk with novelist Valerie Martin about her wonderful new novel, . Some of Martin’s other novels include (2009) and .

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