Fifteen-year-old Oksana Marafioti is a Gypsy. This means touring with the family band from the Mongolian deserts to the Siberian tundra. It means getting your hair cut in “the Lioness.” It also means enduring sneering racism from every segment of Soviet society. Her father is determined that his girls lead a better, freer life. In America! Also, he wants to play guitar with B. B. King. And cure cancer with his personal magnetism. All of this he confides to the woman at the American embassy, who inexplicably allows the family entry. Soon they are living on the sketchier side of Hollywood.
What little Oksana and her sister, Roxy, know of the United States they’ve learned from MTV, subcategory George Michael. It doesn’t quite prepare them for the challenges of immigration. Why are the glamorous Kraft Singles individually wrapped? Are the little soaps in the motels really free? How do you protect your nice new boyfriend from your opinionated father, who wants you to marry decently, within the clan?
In this affecting, hilarious memoir, Marafioti cracks open the secretive world of the Roma and brings the absurdities, miscommunications, and unpredictable victories of the immigrant experience to life. With unsentimentally perfect pitch, American Gypsy reveals how Marafioti adjusted to her new life in America, one slice of processed cheese at a time.
In St. Petersburg, Russia, world chess champion Aleksandr Bezetov begins a quixotic quest: He launches a dissident presidential campaign against Vladimir Putin. He knows he will not win—and that he is risking his life in the process—but a deeper conviction propels him forward.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, thirty-year-old English lecturer Irina Ellison struggles for a sense of purpose. Irina is certain she has inherited Huntington’s disease—the same cruel illness that ended her father’s life. When Irina finds an old, photocopied letter her father wrote to the young Aleksandr Bezetov, she makes a fateful decision. Her father asked the chess prodigy a profound question—How does one proceed in a lost cause?—but never received an adequate reply. Leaving everything behind, Irina travels to Russia to find Bezetov and get an answer for her father, and for herself.
Q Your subject is so upsetting -- and yet "Unnatural Selection" is surprisingly addictive with its rich characters and scenes. Did any writers inspire your style?
A I admire the way Philip Gourevitch writes about Rwanda -- you know, the book with the really long title, "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families."
For a nickel summary of the book you could go with this NPR piece, but if you have more time, the video above or the audio (also available via iTunes) on this page, New Books in Gender Studies, will give you a more thorough overview of the book. Much of the controversy surrounding sex selection centers on abortion. In this Salon article, Hvistendahl focuses on how antiabortion advocates (like NYT columnist Ross Douthat) read her wrong.
A step removed but not completely unrelated, Hvistendahl writes for the Atlantic about the consequences of having a child, including her own, in the Year of the Dragon. Or try this Science podcast about predicting unrest and conflict in countries with a demographic "youth bulge", another interesting convergence of science and human rights. Finally, of concern to our work on behalf of Chinese dissidents, see this article, The Great Forgetting, which mentions another Rights Readers author, Ma Jian.
Amnesty researcher Diana Eltahawy gives an on the ground report on the current unrest in Egypt in the video above, passing on concerns about impunity for police who commit human rights violations. If an action becomes available, we will pass that on.
This brought to mind that Alaa Al Aswany, activist and author of The Yacoubian Building has given a couple of interviews about the progress of the Arab Spring revolution that are worth your time. A short one from BBC Newshourhere, and a longer podcast from Radio Open Sourcehere. In a wide-ranging discussion, he talks about his public confrontation with Mubarak-appointed Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik during the uprising and dispenses advice for moving forward.
What we are expecting but never had from the Western governments is just to leave us alone. We are going to do our democracy for ourselves. But do not support the terrible dictators! That’s what happened with Mubarak. He has been supported by the Western governments for decades, right? Everybody knew what kind of dictator he was. But this question of ‘interests’ — he was ‘okay’; he was doing what Israel wanted; and there was another assumption that he was the barrier against Islamism; but he was not the barrier, he was the reason for the fanaticism in Egypt. That’s clear in my novel… The point here is that what we need from the Western governments is not to support Arab dictators any more…
Wikipedia suggests that another novel is forthcoming.
Stephen King has written an essay, Guns, in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre. As master of the horror genre, King has special insight into our deepest psychological fears and the lethal ways they can combust especially in adolescence. The piece deals in part with his early novel Rage, which he had pulled after it was implicated in several shootings,
My book did not break or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken. Yet I did see Rage as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale. You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.
King asks gun-owners to similarly accept responsibility and work for sensible gun restrictions. A provocative read for those who want to wrestle with First and Second Amendment dilemmas! Download the essay here.You can also learn more about the essay from Brain Pickings.
Looking forward to our April discussion book, Alex Gilvarry's From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, which makes use of satire to expose the post-9/11 security state, I was excited to see Teju Cole's experiment in Twitter fiction which exposes our 'empathy gap' with drone victims by deploying strikes on famous literary characters:
1. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist's.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
I highly recommend this interview with Cole from CBC Radio about what he is trying to accomplish here. Does the graft of fiction on news headline work for you? (From Think Progress, here's an interesting critique). You many also want to learn more from Teju Cole (tejucole) on Twitter and his personal website. Cole's novel Open City has been on my to-read list for quite awhile and this is going to bump it up to the top. Maybe we will get him onto the Rights Readers list soon, too.
By the way, it occurred to me that we had previously discussed the empathy gap brought about by advances in military technology when we read Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond by Michael Ignatieff more than a decade ago. Sure enough, he has something to say about drones (Financial Times June 2012), noting that they fulfill our wish for harm without consequence, thereby becoming the 'mercenaries of the 21st century,' but it's not at all clear they are effective in achieving political goals,
Before succumbing to these technologies, leaders should remember how little virtual war has actually accomplished. Kosovo is still a corrupt ethnic tyranny; Libya will take years to put itself back together; and no one can see a stable state in sight in Afghanistan. Virtual war turned out to be the easy part. Democracies have little staying power for the hard part.
Urge the President and Congress to bring US use of armed drones and other lethal force in line with our obligations to respect human rights here.
Did you catch the news that Chilean authorities have arrested the former army officers accused of involvement in the murder of singer Victor Jara? Jara was killed after the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power in 1973. Listen to the clip above from PRI's The World to hear Pete Seeger tell the story of Jara's death and how the musician inspired him. Further arrests in the case are expected, according to the BBC, including one officer who currently lives in the U.S. An international justice case worth monitoring.
Something else to watch for in the coming year is a new documentary, The Resurrection of Victor Jara. See the trailer below:
For July, we have selected American Gypsy: A Memoir by Oksana Marafioti, 
