2012 Year in Review: 12 Great Human Rights Reads

Rights Readers had a terrific reading/discussion year in 2012, I think one of our best.  Here are the books we read and enjoyed together:

In January we read Andrew X. Pham's
The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars, the 'prequel' to the author's wonderful memoir Catfish and Mandala, which we read a few years ago. Eaves tells the story of Pham's father, from the French occupation through WWII and the Vietnam War, in powerful, elegant prose.

We read Susan Choi's novel of paranoia in the age of terrorism, A Person of Interest, in February. I enjoyed her description of academic life in a Midwestern college town, and although her tendency to overwrite slows the book down, I was very invested in the characters by the end and the story had enough 'thriller' in it to propel me forward, eager to get to the satisfying conclusion.


In March, we read A Woman Among Warlords by Malalai Joya. The real pay-off for reading about this brave pioneer for women's rights in Afghanistan was learning that she was the namesake and personal hero for the young Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai who was nearly killed this fall for advocating for education for girls like herself. We look forward to reading Malala's books some day.

We read Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife in April. This impressive debut novel set in the aftermath of the Balkan conflict combines history and folktale in a narrative quest for recovery and healing. I'll be interested to see what this young author does next.

In May, we set sail with National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis' The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World to explore human diversity in remote corners of the globe. Drawing inspiration from such endangered cultures as the seafaring navigators of Polynesia renewed our commitment to language diversity and cultural preservation.

We read Ursula Hegi's novel set on the cusp of World War II, Children and Fire, in June. This was the first time I read Hegi and it won't be the last. Many of the issues the characters in this novel grapple with--propaganda, reproductive health, the roles of teachers and parents as moral guides-- were especially resonant in this election year.


In July we read Avi Steinberg's memoir about working in a prison library, Running the Books.  We loved the author's humorous insights into prison culture and wise reflections on the value of reading and writing. I managed to spread the love for this book to a second book group. Don't be afraid to suggest it to yours!


As usual, in August we took a break from more serious human rights fare and read The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall. If you enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith's Precious Ramotswe, you should give Indian detective Vish Puri a try.


The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness by Jordan Goodman, our September selection is a hard book to recommend. The subject, British diplomat Roger Casement's efforts to expose abuses in the South American rubber industry, is fascinating (as is Casement's entire life), but the delivery here is just too dull for the casual reader. If you've read Mario Vargas Llhosa's The Dream of the Celt (which I still want to get to), or you're writing a term paper on the history of corporate accountabilty this would be a good book to consult. Otherwise, I'd hold out for a biopic.

I haven't done a formal poll to find out what our favorite book was this year, but I'd put money on Hector Tobar's The Barbarian Nurseries winning any popularity contest. And that's not just because the author kindly graced us with his presence at our discussion! This book hit all the marks for us with themes like race, class, immigration, parenting and the politics of urban landscaping in a highly readable package. And yes of course, we love a good L.A. story!

In November, we read Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. This very personal look at the lives of ordinary East Germans shocked us with how little we knew about the aftermath of reunification and the impunity granted to the secret police. Highly recommended.

Finally, this December, we have read Scenes from Village Life by Israeli novelist Amos Oz. This novel-in-stories spins unsettling tales about what's happening below the surface of a small Israeli town-- a great way to move past the familiar headlines from the Middle East and engage in a new way.

Keep an eye on the blog for news of our great 2013 picks. From what I have read of our up-coming books so far, we will have another great year.

Our April Author: Tea Obreht

This month we are reading The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht. Be sure to check out our previous posts on the book. I think this is one of those books where you benefit from understanding the author's journey in writing the book. This bookstore reading plus Q&A helps you see how the book evolved and Obreht is a very charming presenter.



If your copy of the book didn't come with the Reader's Guide you can find it here.  It includes an interview with novelist Jennifer Egan. A few additional interviews of note:

The Guardian:

A few weeks later, she travelled to Serbia to visit his grave. "It's in the family crypt, which he and I used to wash together when I was a child, because his mother is buried there." Obreht isn't religious – her grandfather was a Roman Catholic from Slovenia, her grandmother is a Muslim from Bosnia, and while they observed cultural traditions, her engagement has never gone further than that. She found herself thinking, "how can people suppose there's something after death, when really it's just your body going into the ground? The reality was very difficult to reconcile with the idea of this as a holy process. I couldn't work it out. Which led to the thought: you're going to die some day too. Which led to several years of being very careful crossing the street."

The Rumpus:

Rumpus: You write very convincingly about the lives of adolescents in a war torn country — it’s eat, drink, be merry because there’s a war on. Were you old enough to be cognizant of what was going on in Yugoslavia? Where does that come from?
Obreht: I think that a lot of the places that I moved to were places that had political problems and tensions that aren’t necessarily present in more Western locales right now. I think that, even though I was decidedly too young to appreciate what was going on in Yugoslavia at the time, but from having returned there many times since moving to the States, I got the general feeling, from conversations with people my own age and with people who’ve lived there and people we left behind, that there’s this, “life goes on” attitude. People deal with strife by just doing every day things.

Powells:

Jill: The contrast of the modern and scientific with the ritual, superstitious, and mythic makes the book feel epic as well as specific in its exploration of grief and loss, both personal and national.
Obreht: I think that it was very clear early on with the story of the tiger and the girl that the question of myth and reality was going to be a big one, and a very important factor in the whole book. The fact that Natalia and Zóra are doctors, and the grandfather, too, also happened very organically. I have a friend who's a doctor in Serbia, and I know through her anecdotes, that in places where superstition and homeopathy, in some ways, are the standard approach of the people, there's a great conflict with science. This is something my friend had to navigate pretty much every day and negotiate with people and their beliefs. Some of the superstitions are very, very prevalent. Yet, in some places there, you really feel like it's a culture on the brink of leaving those ancient beliefs behind. And, so, it came very naturally. Somebody once said, the universal is in the specifics, so, hopefully, it is the specifics that made it that way.

And don't miss this Harpers article, "Twilight of the Vampires", by Obreht which informed the story of the 'deathless man.' Because I am an ethnomusicology geek, I need to investigate the gusla. Wikipedia is helpful and here are some additional sound files from the Library of Congress.

Finally, we didn't really plan for this, but we somehow managed to be reading this book at the time of the twentieth anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo. See NPR's story here. Read Amnesty International's plea for justice for justice for war-time survivors of sexual violence here.

What Is It About A Zoo?

One of the key events in Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife is the 1941 Easter Sunday bombing of the Belgrade Zoo. As it happens, this event was also depicted in the 1995 award-winning film Underground directed by Emir Kusturica. Watch the opening sequence here. You can see from just this excerpt that it shares a certain sensibility with the novel, combining tragedy and humor, absurdity with pathos.  Here's an account of how Obreht visited the Syracuse Zoo when she found herself in need of inspiration. She explains in this interview with fellow novelist Jennifer Egan,

There is something jarring about seeing an animal out of place: there’s a universal feeling of awe when you see an animal, particularly an impressive animal, out of place.

The novel reminded me of some other war torn zoo-themed books: Diane Ackerman's true story of the Warsaw Zoo and the Polish resistance, The Zookeeper's Wife, and the graphic novel Pride of Baghdad, inspired by the destruction of the Baghdad Zoo during the Iraq War in 2003. Poet Brian Turner also meditated on the strange animals roaming about the city in "The Baghdad Zoo" (from his collection Here, Bullet). Apparently, there's even an award-winning play that makes use of the incident, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. Last but not least, AIUSA's Human Rights Now blog notes that the website that accompanies Sacha Baron Cohen's latest satire The Dictator, highlights tourism attractions for the fictional Republic of Wadiya's zoo, including endangered species such as "pandas, white tigers, and Amnesty International officials." Hah!  Have I missed any good displaced animal stories? What is it about a zoo?

Rivers for Reflection

Yesterday I attended a very moving St. Paul Chamber Orchestra performance of Neharot, Neharot by Israeli composer Betty Olivero for viola, accordion, percussion and two string ensembles. The viola soloist was Kim Kashkashian, who has recorded the composition. This haunting piece uses the elegies of women who had lost loved ones in the Israeli conflict with militias of the Lebanese Hezbollah in 2006 as it's touchstone.  The program notes explain,

The title of the composition Neharo't Neharo't, means “Rivers, Rivers” in Hebrew and refers to the rivers and floods of tears which are too often shed by mourning women in disastrous situations. On the other hand, the title contains also an element of hope: the root of the Hebrew word “nahar” (river) resembles the word “nehara,” meaning “ray of light.”

I found the music very appropriate to marking this Holy Week and the season of reflection we experience each April with Remembrance Days for both the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. How fitting too, that we are reading Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife this month at the same time the people of Sarajevo are commemorating the 20th anniversary of the siege their city. Take a few minutes to soak this in. Listen to Part 1 above. Here is Part 2.

Rights Readers Goes to the Opera

I discovered recently that the Lyric Opera of Chicago plans a 2015 world premier opera based on Ann Patchett's novel (about an opera singer), Bel Canto. Peruvian-born composer Jimmy Lopez has been assigned the score and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz will pen the libretto, with soprano Renee Fleming as creative consultant. Although the book seems an obvious choice for stage treatment, the Chicago Reader notes a formidable barrier,

The story, about a group of trapped hostages and their captors, all speaking different languages and communicating through an interpreter, is a dramatist's nightmare. Cruz says he "immediately connected" with the material of the novel, but is wrestling with the fact that "we have to be cautious or the translator will be the main character."

We'll keep an eye on this.

Meanwhile, this got me to wondering just how many books we have read that have subsequently been turned into operas. When you stop and think about it, there is a lot of drama in the struggle for human rights, with plenty of  bloody action, soulful martyrs, and just general outrageousness that opera requires.

Probably the most famous book-to-opera we've encountered would be Dead Man Walking, based on Helen Prejean's death row memoir, which has been successfully produced by a number of opera companies. Sister Helen wrote on her blog recently,

I was just in Tulsa, Oklahoma, giving talks and media interviews for the opera of Dead Man Walking, which opens on February 25, performed by the Tulsa Opera. I got to meet the entire cast, including the 12 or so children, whose piping young voices inject hope.

Immediately after I left, Kirstin Chavez, the mezzo who will portray me (her aria is “My journey…”) got on Facebook with Susan Graham and Joyce DiDonato who have been me in past operas. I heard the Sr Helen Trio had a lively chat, with the two vets offering robust encouragement to Kirstin.

I appreciate opera singers now that I realize how long they prepare, how hard they work, and the stress they feel.

Joyce DiDonato and the Houston Grand Opera will release a recording of a recording Dead Man Walking on April 24. Click here for an xcerpt from the production that includes the children Sister Helen mentions.

Another book we have read that has been transformed for the stage is Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls. Orchestra Miami will present the opera this fall.  The world premier performance of the Jorge Martin score, by the Fort Worth Opera featuring baritone Wes Mason as the dissident Cuban writer, has also been recorded. Here's a sample:



Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran has been given a chamber opera staging.  If Nixon in China is worthy of an opera, Iran does seems a likely setting for a contemporary story. That's why I'm really curious about this Tony Kushner-Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis)-Kronos Quartet collaboration promised for the upcoming PEN World Voices Festival.

What else might be diva worthy? Both Sonia Nazario's Enrique's Journey and Junot Diaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao have received theatrical treatments. But I was thinking our most recent book, The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht would be a good candidate-- they can stage the Lion King right? So a tiger, a bear or a stray elephant can't be that hard. It's got a song-writing, gusla-playing character, multiple generations of tragedy, zany fantasy elements and oh, the 'tiger's wife' is a deaf-mute. Hmm. That could be tough, but I'm sure there are some creative minds out there up to the challenge.

Catching up with Clea Koff

This month we are reading The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, a novel that takes us to the Balkans, and in the company of a young woman and her grandfather, both physicians, and a lot of inventive folktale-like storytelling, into the physical and psychological wounds of several generations of conflict.  There's even some digging for bones, and that reminded me of an earlier nonfiction Rights Readers selection from some years back, The Bone Woman, a memoir by Clea Koff. Koff is a forensic anthropologist who was part of the team investigating war crimes in both Rwanda and the Balkans. Here's an interview from last summer where she explains the kind of evidence a forensic team working for the International Criminal Tribune for the Former Yugoslavia might bring to bear on the ongoing trials of war criminals such as Ratko Mladic. For readers of The Tiger's Wife who'd like to know the reality behind the book, The Bone Woman would be a good place to start.

Of course, I was interested in finding out what Koff has been up to recently and was surprised to learn that she is the author of two mysteries, Freezing and the forthcoming Passing about a pair of L.A-based forensic investigators solving missing persons identification cases. Sounds promising! Mystery fans! Let me know if you think one of these would be a good option for our August mystery month selection some time...

For April: The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

We have selected Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife for April. Obreht. The novel won the Orange Prize and Obreht is the youngest writer ever to receive the award. She is also the youngest of the featured authors in this year's New Yorker '20 under 40' edition and The Tiger's Wife was chosen as one of the top five fiction books this year.  Please join us in learning more about this new talent and her tale of the Balkan war,

In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself. 

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel. 

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,” Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories” of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.