Rights Readers Round-up

Just catching up on some of our Rights Readers authors:

Excellent interview with Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) on the BBC World Book Club.

Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) discusses editing a collection of short stories by Latin American writers with the The New Yorker. Names to watch for?

Arundhati Roy (The Cost of Living) on the crisis in Sri Lanka. Follow the latest on Sri Lanka on AIUSA's Human Rights Now blog.

Going back a couple months on this one, but here's a New Yorker podcast on the Politkovskaya (Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy) trial. Amnesty insight here.

Tribute to Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls) at PEN World Voices. Francisco Goldman (The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?) participated in a panel too.

Our May Author: Robin Wright

First, Robin Wright, author of our May selection Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East has her own website. She's also the sort of author who does all the TV/radio talkshows to promote her book, such as NPR , The Diane Rehm Show, a FORA.tv broadcast of an LAPL event and Authors@Google, much of which just summarizes the book's contents, so why not just get it all in a nutshell on Comedy Central?

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Robin Wright
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Gay Marriage

Also this Terence McNally interview at least kicks off with an anecdote about her days as a sports reporter for the Michigan Daily (Go Blue!).

You can catch her punditizing on more recent events on this Meet the Press episode: How will Obama cash in political capital? Or as suggested by a Loyal Reader, this Diane Rehm Show panel about Iran/US relations sparked by the Roxana Saberi case.

The Rights Readers Supreme Court

Nine years or so ago, we read Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence by Martha Minow. Now its come to my attention that the author is on at least one speculative list for the current Supreme Court vacancy.



Rights Readers trivia question: what other author we've read has made a Supremes speculation list? Hint: Minow names her in the video above from Facing History.

Minow'slatest looks like it would be interesting to the educators among us (more here.

Making Rights Really Universal

Aww, all this Star Trek mania is making me nostalgic for the days when Amnesty International Group 22 tabled at the Star Trek convention in Pasadena. I wish I had pictures, but at least I still have my delegation badge! Remember when the Trekkies used to scarf up our cute little Universal Declaration of Human Rights booklets with the UN logo on them that kinda-sorta resembles the logo at left, thinking they had stumbled on some profound interplanetary document? But surely the United Federation would have a UDHR-derived bill of rights governing earthlings and aliens! For another flashback, try this Slate article, "Star Trek: The Next Generation's eerily prescient torture episode", which I recall we helped to promote (note that the article does mention an interplanetary version of the Geneva Convention.)

Philip Gourevitch Update

Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, a book Rights Readers selected almost ten years ago, has returned to Rwanda and although the resulting New Yorker article is available to subscribers only, you can listen to him discuss his experiences here. He has also suggested some further reading on the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath at The Book Bench. On another of his favorite topics, you can read some of his recent commentary on torture here and listen to a discussion on the topic on the April 23rd edition of the "Political Scene" podcast.

For August: Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris

For August, we have selected Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris,

When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing, her prominent family calls on Nayir al-Sharqi, a pious desert guide, to lead the search party. Ten days later, just as Nayir is about to give up in frustration, her body is discovered by anonymous desert travelers. But when the coroner’s office determines that Nouf died not of dehydration but from drowning, and her family seems suspiciously uninterested in getting at the truth, Nayir takes it upon himself to find out what really happened. He quickly realizes that if he wants to gain access to the hidden world of women, he will have to join forces with Katya Hijazi, a lab worker at the coroner’s office who is bold enough to bare her face and to work in public. Their partnership challenges Nayir, as he confronts his desire for female companionship and the limitations imposed by his beliefs. Fast-paced and utterly transporting, Finding Nouf is a riveting literary mystery that offers an unprecedented window into Saudi Arabia and the lives of men and women there.

Our April Author: Ann Cummins

Our environmentally-themed novel for April, Yellowcake, introduces us to author Ann Cummins. Here is her faculty page at Northern Arizona University. Bookbrowse offers us an interview,

Why did you choose this subject?

I grew up in the Colorado Plateau area and, like some of my characters, I'm from generations of Colorado miners. So the history and landscape are personal to me. My father was a uranium mill worker in Durango, Colorado, and his company began operating a mill in Shiprock, New Mexico, on the Navajo reservation when I was nine. So the reservation, too, is personal to me. I lived there for nine years and went to public school there.

Intrepid Reader Stevi (and our resident expert on all things nuclear) recommends the following links as background to the environmental themes of the novel:

Navajo Justice Page (Excellent overview!)

Uranium Impact Assessment Program (Activist resource!)

The real deal and more:

"Memories Come To Us In the Rain and the Wind", Oral Histories and Photographs of Navajo Uranium Miners & Their Families

Navajo Uranium Miners fight for Compensation
Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims

Mount Tenabo and Navajo uranium mining