Our September Author: Kati Marton

This month we are reading the Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America by Kati Marton. After finishing this memoir about her parents' struggles as journalists in Cold War era Hungary and noting Marton's own career as a journalist it is unsurprising to learn that she serves on the Board of Directors for the Committee to Protect Journalists and that she recently won an award from the United Nations Association for her human rights advocacy work. Her acceptance speech makes a good, brief self-introduction and is worth checking out. She draws parallels between the Hungarian Uprising and the Arab Spring, explains her motivations for her work with CPJ, and presents how she aims to connect past and present in her books. The Millions has an interview with the author where she summarizes,

This is a book about terror and surveillance and how the terror state functioned… which is by fear, which is by implicating the whole population, making everybody in a sense complicit in the way that it turned even our closest friends and relatives into informers. I think that is the theme. And how these two people, my mother and father, survived. More than survived. They survived with their heads held high.

Also, this short interview from Hungarian Watch shows Marton's attentiveness to on-going human rights issues in Hungary.  Amnesty covers current concerns here.

Below is a video interview from ForaTv. You may also want to check out a couple of interviews available as free iTunes downloads from the New York Public Library and Chautauqua Podcasts. I especially enjoyed the Chautauqua interview because it skipped past the information you already know if you've read the book kicking off, for example, with a question about the reception of the book in Hungary.



And just for fun, there is this exchange between Kati Marton and another Rights Readers author, Samantha Power (A Problem from Hell) discussing a different Marton book, The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World.


Finally, from a few months back, Marton contributed an editorial to the New York Times upon the capture of Ratko Mladic, the butcher of Srebrenica, reflecting on the bittersweet nature of this event, "a very good day for humanity" coming after the death of her husband, Richard Holbrooke, who had negotiated the end of the Balkan conflict.

Rights Readers Authors on Libya

We've already mentioned that Stephen Kinzer and Wangari Maathai have weighed in on the military action in Libya, but I just wanted to at least note that Obama administration advisor, Samantha Power (A Problem from Hell), has been prominently featured in reports as supporting the push to implement a no-fly zone.  It may be some time before we are able to get her insider account of the debate leading up to this decision, but Loyal Readers may want to check out the kinds of questions another of our authors, Philip Gourevitch, poses in response to these developments.  See also this Amnesty International Q&A. Take action on behalf of refugees fleeing Libya here.

Rights Readers Round-up

Rights Readers authors have been busy this summer:

Iran continues to be a major topic of commentary: check out Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) in the NYT: I Must Go Home to Iran Again. Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) calls for freeing filmmaker Maziar Bahari (more from AIUSA and action) Message to Tehran: Let our truth-teller go. Stephen Kinzer (Crescent and Star) is optimistic Iran and U.S. 'not fated to be enemies forever' and offers some advice to Obama on a shared birthday.

On the home front, Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) has three NYT editorials with audio supplement on the how the recession has hit the "already poor," here, here and here, while Hector Tobar (The Tattooed Soldier) has another insightful column on immigration. Walter Mosley (Little Scarlet) offers 10 Things You Need to Know to Live on the Streets, and has an opinion piece in Newseek: America's Obsession with Crime which he also discusses on NPR.

Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains) pays tribute to a local hero he met while writing his latest book (Strength in What Remains) in the NYT: A Death in Burundi. Edwidge Danticat (Brother, I'm Dying) writes an appreciation of Nobelist Wole Soyinka for the Progressive.

Mark Hertsgaard (Earth Odyssey) reports from Burkina Faso on climate change and appears on a FORA.tv panel on food security and climate change. Hertsgaard is preparing a book on the subject, certainly a good candidate for a Rights Read. Kevin Bales (Disposable People) is interviewed about his latest book, The Slave Next Door.

As follow up to our discussion of Caroline Elkins, (Imperial Reckoning), check out the Times (London) coverage of efforts by Mau Mau veterans to investigate torture claims, here and here with analysis here and here. Speaking of Kenya, Michela Wrong (I Didn't Do It for You) can be found promoting her new book, It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower at openDemocracy (see also interviews with NPR and NYT.) Her pr strategy has some interesting twists.

Muhammad Yunus (Banker To The Poor) was one of the luminaries who received a presidential medal of freedom. Paul Farmer (Mountains Beyond Mountains) will not be heading USAID, but Samantha Power (A Problem from Hell) has been appointed by President Obama to assist refugees of Iraq war. And did you know that in a nod to the late Russian journalists Anna Politkovskaya (Putin's Russia) and her brave colleagues, President Obama gave an interview in Novaya Gazeta on his recent Moscow visit? More from CPJ. Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking) has some post-papal audience questions for Obama (and the activist community). Meanwhile Jarvis Jay Masters' (Finding Freedom) latest, That Bird Has My Wings is available for amazon pre-order.

Okay, so I should probably post a little more often so as not to make this such a huge link dump... but at least I'm caught up!

Spring Cleaning

Lately I've accumulated a backlog of links which I should have blogged in a timely fashion so that you would have learned that Michael Ignatieff (Rights Readers selection Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond) is now the leader of Canada's Liberal Party -- and just now has taken the opportunity of his meeting with President Obama to discuss the case of Guantanamo juvenile detainee Omar Khadr.

Or you would know that Samantha Power (A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide) has taken a position with the NSC, but before she stepped up to serve she wrote yet another profile of a human rights defender for the New Yorker (and oh yeah here's a short version of the one she wrote a whole book about.)

And then there's Arundhati Roy's (The Cost of Living) response to the Mumbai attacks, the fact that Jon Burge (a central figure in John Conroy's Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture) was arrested last fall, and Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) had a New Yorker short story with a provocative title published in October.

Fortunately, this American Scholar article about Chinese censorship by Ha Jin (Ocean of Words Army Stories and The Crazed) is the sort of thing that doesn't date that fast and a little item in my local paper-- "Last month a bipartisan group of six members of Congress nominated Greg Mortenson [Three Cups of Tea] for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize"-- might still make a you-heard-it-here-first list.

Phew! That felt good! Perhaps we'll do that again sometime, sooner rather than later.