Our September Book: The Devil and Mr. Casement by Jordan Goodman

This month, we are reading The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness by Jordan Goodman. Roger Casement is a fascinating historical figure who we have encountered before (in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost and Peter Robb's A Death in Brazil) who is also the subject of Mario Vargas Llhosa's most recent novel, The Dream of the Celt. It's a wonder there hasn't been a biopic starring, say, Daniel Day-Lewis about him, though there is really too much drama for just one film, just as there is too much to cover in one book. Although this book concentrates on Casement's investigations of the exploitation of indigenous peoples by rubber barons in the Amazon, there are a couple of enjoyable ways to get a thumbnail summary of his entire life. One is to listen to the ballad below, but if you have a little more time you can listen to the radio drama The Dreaming of Roger Casement (download via iTunes) from RTE (Radio Ireland).



I wish I could provide a little more background on Jordan Goodman or an interview about his book but I have hit a dead end on that front. There are still a few resources on the internet to supplement our reading, however. You can actually page through Walter Hardenburg's 1913 report "The Putumayo, the devil's paradise; travels in the Peruvian Amazon region and an account of the atrocities committed upon the Indians therein."  Here's a very brief film clip of Casement and a newsreel about his state funeral in Ireland almost fifty years after his death.  RTE also has a program in which a panel speculates "What if Roger Casement had not kept a diary?" (download via iTunes). An Independent 2011 news story of interest, "The Mystery of the Missing Amazonian Rubber Slaves" traces the fates of Omarino and Ricudo, the two Indians Casement brought back to England,

"We are sent far, far into the forest to get rubber, and if we do not get it, or if we do not get it quickly enough, we are shot," Omarino told the Daily News, a popular national newspaper founded and edited by Charles Dickens. "London is very wonderful, but the great river and the forest, where the birds fly, is more beautiful. One day we shall go back."
The men did make it back to South America in the end, but the last known record of their whereabouts shows them separated from their homes by thousands of miles of thick rainforest.

I tend to think of the movement for corporate responsibility in human rights as a relatively new development so this book was very instructive in showing that human rights activists have been seeking justice, not just from governments, but from businesses for more than a hundred years. Unfortunately, the descendants of the Putamayo Indians are still facing environmental threats brought on by corporate exploitation of their resources. This Survival International article compares the Roger Casement story to the current illegal trade in mahogany, which we read about in Ted Conover's The Routes of Man. Jordan Goodman notes the exploitation of the Putumayo by the oil and gas industry.  You can learn more about the current struggle by watching the documentary, Crude  or check out Amnesty International's corporate accountability program, their specific work on Chevron in Ecuador, a success story for indigenous rights in Peru, and an action you can take here.

Our July Author: Avi Steinberg

This month we are discussing Avi Steinberg's Running the Books, a memoir about the adventures of a prison librarian. Although I had some concern about being 'trapped' in a book about prisons in July, a month when I usually try to propose travel books, I really enjoyed this journey.  We've got a few links to get things rolling, starting with his personal website: avisteinberg.com.  Because the book contains quite a bit of the author's backstory, the usual interviews don't reveal a whole lot more than you learn in the book, but if you haven't read it yet and need a shortcut to prepare for the meeting, start here. I learned of the book from this NPR interview.  This profile from Harvard magazine is also a good introduction,

Any assumptions about the ease of book learning quickly disappeared. “As a prison librarian, you need to fight for the space, fight to purchase the books, fight to keep books on the shelves, fight for people to be able to come to the library, fight to keep people coming back to the library,” Steinberg says of his daily struggles. “It takes a lot of effort to bring books alive for people. To me, this was not obvious before.”

For those that have read the book and want more, Steinberg has been writing on a variety of (often amusing) subjects for publications like the Paris Review and The New Yorker. Check out this video if you want a preview of his next book. And you definitely want to check out this piece from Huffpo: Conversations with a Young Islamist in the Prison Library,

I can honestly say that if Akh did become a radical Islamist in prison it was despite the education he received in the prison library. It is just as likely that our conversations--simply the example of an open and respectful dialogue--planted a seed. It was, after all, a kind of tolerance that kept him coming back enthusiastically to the prison library and that kept our conversations honest and alive. In prison, and even in the balkanized world at large, this alone is a rare achievement.

Of course, we've covered some of this territory before. I was happy to see that Ted Conover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing got a nod from the author. We read the book a while back (along with two others by the author, making Conover Rights Readers' all-time favorite author) and recommend it if you enjoyed Running. You may be interested to learn that New Jack is still contraband in the New York prison system, but the author wrote recently about his first return visit to Sing Sing to see an inmate-produced play and he testifies to the role of theater in envisioning alternative roles as a part of rehabilitation. Huffpo also has a good interview with Conover. By the way, Ted Conover is not the only author we've read whose books have been banned behind bars. I linked to this once before, but I recommend this video of Toni Morrison and Angela Davis discussing the value of prison libraries and problems with censors.  The Austin Statesman has a fascinating report on books and authors banned in Texas prisons, including Edwidge Danticat. I also liked this article about a lawsuit filed by the always inspiring Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative on behalf of an Alabama inmate who was banned from reading the Pulitzer Prize winning book Slavery by Another Name. 

Take a look at this birds-eye view of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. There's a prison near you. If you've got some books you'd like to donate to a prison, this looks like a good place to start. If you want to learn more about prison issues, Slate has a round-up of some excellent investigative journalism on the subject. If you're in favor of more books, more dialog, better libraries, and better rehabilitation programs, you'll want to join the growing campaign to rethink the practice of solitary confinement.  Take action on behalf of the "Angola 3' here. See also the recent action against conditions at TAMMS Supermax prison in Illinois. More info/action from Solitary Watch. There's a lot of work to be done!

Our May Author: Ted Conover

This month we are reading Ted Conover's The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World.  We are big fans of Mr. Conover, having read Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing and Coyotes (and I've also read Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes) so he already feels like an old friend.  His personal website does a good job cataloging his books, articles, interviews and podcasts and you will definitely want to explore the 'extra' features related to Routes which include maps of the book's locations, photos and a video of the Zanskar ice trek.  I enjoyed this Zócalo Public Square talk (also available through iTunes) which starts by revisiting some of the ground we traveled with the author in Coyotes and New Jack:


Guernica, as always, has an excellent interview,

Guernica: You said earlier how roads are about “the possibility of something transformative that doesn’t always work out in the way we expect; the inadequacy of our own plans, the fallibility of our intentions.” Are there any examples of failed intentions you saw on your travels?

Ted Conover: One of the most baldly failed examples of roads is the highway from Kandahar to Kabul in Afghanistan. On inauguration day, U.S. officials had to fly in because the road was too dangerous. So right there you have someone’s fragment of what a good idea might have been, but then the political reality makes it seem laughable.

And Salon is good too, here tying in last month's Peruvian selection (Red April) and the recent death of Osama Bin Laden:

What’s the scariest moment you had on the road?
...

The most frightening moment I had was probably in Peru. There are a lot of remnants of the Shining Path in the Andes, and one day, I was sitting on the side of the road when a blue butterfly landed on my knee. It was bigger than my hand and a lovely iridescent blue. I brought out a cheap plastic camera I’d bought, to take a picture of it, and a campesino came up to me. He said, in Spanish, If you’d been doing that 10 years ago they would have found you hanging in the tree right there. He meant it was such a bourgeois affectation. Something as innocent as photographing a butterfly!

Five days later, I passed a kid wearing an Osama bin Laden T-shirt, and I said, I’m from New York, and I knew people in the towers that day, and your T-shirt upsets me. He said, Bin Laden is a champion of the world’s poor. And I said, Well maybe of the Muslim poor, but I don’t think he’s a champion of you.

Maybe it’s because it was so near 9/11, but those two incidents gave me a feeling of passing through an unfriendly place, and it’s not a feeling I often had.

In this brief Atlantic interview Conover talks about trends in travel writing and 'participatory journalism' (although the interview focuses mainly on New Jack, you might also be interested in On the Media's interview with Conover regarding the ethics of undercover reporting). and in this article for The Week, he names his favorite road books.  We've had some great journeys with Rights Readers-- what would you add to his list?

For May: The Routes of Man by Ted Conover

For May we have selected The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World by Rights Readers favorite (Newjack, Coyotes) Ted Conover,

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Newjack, an absorbing book about roads and their power to change the world.

Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Roads have unparalleled power to impact communities, unite worlds and sunder them, and reveal the hopes and fears of those who travel them.

With his marvelous eye for detail and his contagious enthusiasm, Ted Conover explores six of these key byways worldwide. In Peru, he traces the journey of a load of rare mahogany over the Andes to its origin, an untracked part of the Amazon basin soon to be traversed by a new east-west route across South America. In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS. In the West Bank, he monitors highway checkpoints with Israeli soldiers and then passes through them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and danger borne by both sides. He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their Himalayan valley to see how a new road will affect the now-isolated Indian region of Ladakh. From the passenger seat of a new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in car culture as highways proliferate across China. And from inside an ambulance, he offers an apocalyptic but precise vision of Lagos, Nigeria, where congestion and chaos on freeways signal the rise of the global megacity.

A spirited, urgent book that reveals the costs and benefits of being connected—how, from ancient Rome to the present, roads have played a crucial role in human life, advancing civilization even as they set it back.

Rights Readers Round-up

Prize winners corner:

• Edwidge Danticat (Brother, I'm Dying) won a MacArthur "genius" grant. Her reaction and plans here.

• Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) writes about the connections between the Iranian recipients of this years Anna Politkovskaya Award and the award's namesake and previous winner Natalya Estemirova.

• Memorial wins the Sakharov prize.

• Muhammad Yunus (Banker To The Poor) and Wangari Maathai (Unbowed) defend President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. Nick Kristof suggests Greg Mortenson and Paul Farmer as alternative winners. Foreign Policy runs down a list of Nobel losers including Rights Readers faves Eleanor Roosevelt and Ken Saro-Wiwa.

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the most read book on the New York City subway.

Forthcoming:

• Greg Mortenson has a new book coming out for your holiday gift list.

• Ha Jin's novel Waiting is to be made into a movie and Mira Nair's next project is the film version of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

• Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International (and Nicolas Kristof) talk about the current state of the human rights movement at NPR's On Point. A very interesting discussion, though we don't learn much about Khan's new book, (The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights).

• John Conroy (Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture) has written a play about the Chicago police torture scandal. Also, check out this provocative article about his personal experience as a crime victim.

• Dinaw Mengestu (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears) chats about the cities he's lived in and his next book:
  
  Interview with Dinaw Mengestu from Granta magazine on Vimeo.
  
  

On the issues:

• Bill Moyers interviews Dr. Jim Yong Kim (see Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains) about the connections between our current national healthcare debate and global health issues.

• Ted Conover (Newjack)is interviewed by On the Media about the ethics of his undercover reporting at Sing Sing prison.

• Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) discusses poverty and the recession on NPR's On Point and then stands up for the grumpy among us on the The Daily Show.

• Meanwhile looking ahead to Copenhagen and the climate change talks, Orville Schell (Mandate Of Heaven) writes for the NYT- The Thaw at the Roof of the World- and Mark Hertsgaard (Earth Odyssey) in the Nation- Climate Roulette. Wangari Maathai leaves us with this PSA: