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?

Resurrection after Exoneration

Remember late last month when the Supreme Court overturned a jury verdict awarding 14 million in damages to John Thompson, who spent 18 years on death row in Louisiana before the discovery of prosecutor misconduct got him exonerated? Mr. Thompson tells his own story in a New York Times op-ed (see also Killing Time: An 18-Year Odyssey from Death Row to Freedom) and pleads,

I don’t care about the money. I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn’t do and nearly had me killed are not in jail themselves. There were no ethics charges against them, no criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court, no one can be sued.

A appalling as this verdict is for justice in this case we are lucky that Mr. Thompson is far more generous than the Supreme Court. In the spirit of the Good Friday death penalty actions I used to organize on my church lawn, take a moment to find out about the organization for exonerees, Resurrection after Exoneration, he started by watching the video below, learn more at the Resurrection after Exoneration website...




...and your action for today is to sign the petition for Troy Davis!

Sorting out the Greg Mortenson Scandal

I've waited a few days after the big scandal regarding Greg Mortenson's books (we've read both Greg Mortenson's Stones into Schools and Three Cups of Tea) and his non-profit work building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to see what the fallout would be. Now I think I have a few useful links to share as we try to make sense out of the story.  First, of course there is the original 60 Minutes story and Jon Kraukauer's piece for Byliner.  Mortenson has responded via the Central Asia Institute's website and this interview in Outside. The news for Mortenson gets worse with the Montana Attorney General's office investigating and lawsuits in the wind.

For a more mixed view of Greg Mortenson and CAI from those who have met him and visited his schools, check out this this reaction from a reporter for MinnPost and the NYT editorial by Nick Kristof, Three Cups Spilled.  I also recommend, Peter Hessler's very insightful New Yorker piece, What Mortenson Got Wrong. Kristof worries about cynicism setting in regarding overseas charitable endeavors while Hessler wonders where the skepticism in the press has been for Mortenson and CAI over the past decade.  I've found myself wondering, where have all those now emerging to critique CAI been all these years?  I would gladly have shared that information as part of our discussion. It would have made for a lively debate!

The New Yorker's Book Bench blog comments with a sentiment felt by many readers of his books, I'm sure,

The Times talked to a military official in Afghanistan, who said, “We continue to believe in the logic of what Greg is trying to accomplish in Afghanistan and Pakistan because we know the powerful effects that education can have on eroding the root causes of extremism.” That’s an endorsement of an idea, not a person—the hope is that the idea can survive the person who gave it life, should that person be found wanting.

For the sake of the many school children who saved Pennies for Peace in the hopes of helping children in Pakistan, I too hope the message survives the man.

For August: Blood of the Wicked by Leighton Gage

For August, our mystery month, we have selected Blood of the Wicked by Leighton Gage,

In the interior of Brazil, landless workers battle the owners of vast fazendas. When a visiting archbishop is assassinated, Mario Silva of the federal police is called upon to investigate. Then a newspaper owner, a TV journalist, a landowner’s son, and a priest are brutally killed. In a country where dead street kids are known as “hams,” justice is scarce.

Leighton Gage has spent many years in Brazil, where he maintains a home. He also resides in Florida and lives part of the year in the Netherlands.

Rights Readers Authors on Chinese Dissidents

Today, many people are protesting the detention of the artist Ai Weiwei at Chinese Embassies and consulates around the world with a 'sit-in' homage to Ai's 2007 1001 Chairs exhibition. Check out video from the Berlin protest here.  Other creative protests by artists can be found here and here.  I'm pulling up a virtual chair and following up on my previous post about dissidents Ai Weiwei and Gao Zhisheng and the recent clampdown on dissidents in China and taking a look at what some of the authors we have read previously have had to say about recent events:

To appreciate Ma Jian's (The Noodle Maker) contribution, you first need to take in Ai Weiwei's show at the Tate in London:



The Tate has now incorporated a protest of Ai's detention into the exhibit. Ma Jian's editorial on the artist's detention, 'Sunflower Revolutionary', plays around with the seeds metaphor.

Philip Gourevitch laments that the dragnet has prevented writer Liao Yiwu (The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up) from attending the PEN World Voices Festival in New York later this month. If we weren't reading Gao Zhisheng's A China More Just in July, I would be recommending that we read The Corpse Walker. I hope to get to it on my own. It's the least I can do.


Finally, Orville Schell (Mandate of Heaven) weighs in with some advice:

Rights Readers Round-up

Just a few loose ends to round-up regarding some of our favorite Rights Readers authors:

Elena Kudimova, discusses a new collection of essays by her late sister, Anna Politkovskaya, Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches on WNYC.



Get a taste of Reza Aslan's (No God But God) new program on KCET-- Globalwatch.  Tell me what you think!

Daniel Alarcon (Lost City Radio) reads and discusses a Roberto Bolaño (Amulet) short story for the New Yorker. 


BBC World Book Club has a great interview and discussion with Jo Nesbø about his novel Redbreast.

Ai Weiwei and Gao Zhisheng

As many of our Loyal Readers know, our group maintains a vigilant interest in the human rights climate in China due to our on-going advocacy for the Chinese human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng who was 'disappeared' by the Chinese government a little over a year ago. So it is with increasing dismay that we have been observing the rash of detentions in the past few weeks. The recent arrests are tracked here by Chinese Human Rights Defenders and via this Guardian interactive feature. Amnesty International offers actions for some of the detained individuals here.  The most prominent of those detained is the artist Ai Weiwei. Amnesty notes in their press release about Ai, “If the authorities are so bold as to grab this world-renowned artist in broad daylight at Beijing airport, it’s frightening to think how they might treat other, lesser known dissidents.” Rather than moving in a direction that we hoped would shed more light on Gao's present location and health condition, the Chinese government seems determined to push a growing number of it's human rights defenders into the shadows.

Just before his arrest, I watched the PBS Frontline documentary about Ai Weiwei and I recommend it as a starting point to learn more about this important artist and inspiring activist.  If you missed it, you can watch it a short segment below and the rest on the PBS website which has additional interviews, samples of his Twitter activism, and a slideshow of his art. (The Washington Post and Slate also have good slideshows)  A longer version of this documentary, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, by director Alison Klayman is planned for fall release. I expect our Loyal Readers will be eager to see it in full. Klayman was interviewed by ArtInfo after Ai's detention,

The name of your documentary "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry," and it is true, one thing that is striking is how stubborn the guy is. I wonder if you can make a general comment on the mindset that has led him to stick it out through this kind of persecution.

I really think you can describe his activist efforts, and also his artistic efforts, as tireless. I mean, he will be thorough — once he gets into something, he really gets into something. When he gets into Twitter, he is sending sometimes 300 to 500 Tweets a day. When he undergoes injustice personally in Chengdu, when the police beat him, he continues to gather information and return to Chengdu to seek redress from authorities. When the Sichuan earthquake happened and he was so moved by the tragedy, he didn't just write some blog posts about it and say that was that. He found a way to engage people, to put new information out there. He found all those children's names, and continued to post their birthdays for more than a year afterward on Twitter. When you know him a little and you see that dedication, you really understand how genuine his efforts are. Because you always have to remember, he doesn't have to do any of this. I really think that is one of the messages of the film, and its something you can see if you watch the Frontline piece I did that draws on the same material.

Another interview by Studio 360 available here.
 

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

A few more good links for learning about Ai Weiwei:

Evan Osnos of the New Yorker wrote a fascinating profile of the artist, "It's Not Beautiful: An Artist Takes on the System" last year. You can hear him discuss the detention on NPR's On Point. Or if you need to get straight to the point, read this short piece:  "Letter from China: Why Ai Weiwei Matters."

Interesting critic's view of his art.
 
Ai Weiwei's just-released TED talk:



And for the all-important book reference-- a volume compiling Ai's blogging and twittering has just been released from MIT, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009. The Economist takes a look.  

In a separate post, I'll take a look at what some of our favorite authors are saying about the current crackdown on dissent in China.