Adams: Terrorism and Language

Lorraine Adams discusses the effectiveness of nonfiction books on terrorism in a 2002 Washington Monthly article by, "Terrorism and Language". Here's a taste,

The professor teaching Western Terrorism Literature 1970-2002 might open with the observation that the works of the period have their roots in The Hardy Boys adventure stories--The Sinister Signpost, The Secret Warning, While the Clock Ticked, Mystery of the Desert Giant. A common leitmotif: Only real men are capable of saving an affluent, soft society from foreign predation and apocalypse. The period's overarching theme: Terrorists are bad.

Hiding truth under abstraction was the bad writing of Orwell's day. In our day, Bergen, Emerson, Dershowitz, and Pipes hide truth under entertainment. Their books use hackneyed plotlines, stock characters, and omission of inconvenient facts. They replace the blunt actuality of terrorism with the reassuring thematics of the adventure tale, the spy thriller, the cloak-and-dagger story, even Perry Mason. Their books exhibit the symptoms that Orwell deplored--"staleness of imagery" and "lack of precision.

On the other hand, here's a recent review of a book she likes.

The Millenium Plot

Our February author, Lorraine Adams, won a Pulitzer back in 1992 for investigative reporting on misconduct by Texas police. If this ever inspires her to write a novel, it sounds like something Rights Readers could get behind. But of more immediate interest is her reporting on the so-called "Millenium Plot," the terrorist plot to plant a bomb at LAX. It was her reporting on this story that inspired Harbor. Unfortunately, that reporting has all gone to archive, but to refresh your memory about the case, try this Wikipedia entry on Ahmed Ressam and for a more thorough backgrounder see the website for a PBS Frontline documentary Trail of a Terrorist. Under Links and Resources be sure to note the info on GIA (Armed Islamic Group).

And as a counterweight to the Frontline's reporting on the potential abuse of the asylum system by terrorists consider this 2003 report from Amnesty International: Asylum-seekers fleeing a continuing human rights crisis.

For February: Harbor by Lorraine Adams

Administrative Note: We've swapped our February and March titles in order to allow more time to obtain copies of "A Death in Brazil."

Here is a description of our February title, Harbor by Lorraine Adams.

A powerful first novel that engages the tumultuous events of today: at once an intimate portrait of a group of young Arab Muslims living in the United States, and the story of one man's journey into–and out of–violence.
We first meet Aziz Arkoun as a 24-year-old stowaway–frozen, hungry, his perceptions jammed by a language he can't understand or speak. After 52 days in the hold of a tanker from Algeria, he jumps into the icy waters of Boston harbor and swims to shore. Seemingly rescued from isolation by Algerians he knew as a child, he instead finds himself in a world of disillusionment, duplicity, and stolen identities, living a raw comedy of daily survival not unlike what he fled back home.

As the story of Aziz and his friends unfolds–moving from the hardscrabble neighborhoods of East Boston and Brooklyn to a North African army camp–Harbor makes vivid the ambiguities of these men's past and present lives: burying a murdered girl in the Sahara; reading medieval Persian poetry on a bus, passing for Mexican; shoplifting Versace for clubbing, succumbing to sex in a public library; impersonating a double agent. But when Aziz begins to suspect that he and his friends are under surveillance, all assumptions–his and ours–dissolve in an urgent, mesmerizing complexity.

And as Harbor races to its explosive conclusion, it compels us to question the questions it raises: Who are the terrorists? Can we recognize them? How do they live?

For February: Harbor

Administrative Note: We've swapped our February and March titles in order to allow more time to obtain copies of "A Death in Brazil."

Here is a description of our February title, Harbor by Lorraine Adams.

A powerful first novel that engages the tumultuous events of today: at once an intimate portrait of a group of young Arab Muslims living in the United States, and the story of one man's journey into–and out of–violence.
We first meet Aziz Arkoun as a 24-year-old stowaway–frozen, hungry, his perceptions jammed by a language he can't understand or speak. After 52 days in the hold of a tanker from Algeria, he jumps into the icy waters of Boston harbor and swims to shore. Seemingly rescued from isolation by Algerians he knew as a child, he instead finds himself in a world of disillusionment, duplicity, and stolen identities, living a raw comedy of daily survival not unlike what he fled back home.

As the story of Aziz and his friends unfolds–moving from the hardscrabble neighborhoods of East Boston and Brooklyn to a North African army camp–Harbor makes vivid the ambiguities of these men's past and present lives: burying a murdered girl in the Sahara; reading medieval Persian poetry on a bus, passing for Mexican; shoplifting Versace for clubbing, succumbing to sex in a public library; impersonating a double agent. But when Aziz begins to suspect that he and his friends are under surveillance, all assumptions–his and ours–dissolve in an urgent, mesmerizing complexity.

And as Harbor races to its explosive conclusion, it compels us to question the questions it raises: Who are the terrorists? Can we recognize them? How do they live?