Framing Youth) for our Amnesty International group where I got the idea that the bookstore would be a great venue for on-going discussion about books and human rights. We will always be grateful for their help getting us started.
This month we are reading Toni Morrison's A Mercy. Not surprisingly for such a rich and dense story, every interview and profile has a nugget or three that adds to your appreciation of the book and makes it worth it to take in numerous interviews even with the repetitive bits. This Guardian profile may serve as a good introduction to the author, if this is your first encounter with her. 
to A Mercy:And how did this particular narrative start?NPR introduces more of the book's themes in this short video:
"Well, I have this needy girl. She's going to go on a journey. By herself. Usually, guys go on journeys in narratives and the women stay home.
You've said that you need to hear your characters' voices before you start to write. In A Mercy there are several mesmerizing characters: the young slave, Florens; the Dutch farmer, Jacob Vaark; his wife, Rebekka, who has fled the poverty, filth, crime and sickness of London. Whose voice did you hear first?
I heard Florens's first, the girl. And she approaches language in a slanted way. She can read and write; she learned from a Catholic priest under scary circumstances. And she's taken someplace else; she doesn't know what they're talking about. When she was with her mother she spoke Portuguese. She knows Latin. So I just put all her language together and gave her an individual voice that was "I"--first person--and very visual. But also, once I realized that I could make her speak only in the present tense, it gave the narrative an immediacy, it made me disciplined in revealing what she thought, and it gave her a kind of innocence and, at the same time, a kind of sophistication.
The Chicago Public Library chose A Mercy as their 'One City, One Book' selection in 2010 and assembled some useful resources including a timeline and suggestions for further reading. One of the books Morrison frequently mentions the book Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770
as one of the sources she used for creating the historical texture of the novel. I can imagine certain Loyal Readers wanting to investigate that one... For a little more insight into the history depicted in the novel try these two posts from an historian of the period. Morrison also frequently mentions Bacon's Rebellion in interviews about the book. The website for the PBS series Africans in America may be useful to learn more about this event and about slavery in the colonial period. You can watch the whole series here. Slavery in New York is another site worth visiting. 
Morrison, whose books are among the most frequently challenged, advocates passionately against censorship. The New York Public Library has an entertaining conversation between Angela and Davis and Toni Morrison, Literacy, Libraries and Liberation which explores this issue, the importance of activism and many others (also available on iTunes for free download).
With her son Slade, Morrison has written several children's books (
Peeny Butter Fudge
, Little Cloud and Lady Wind, Who's Got Game?: The Ant or the Grasshopper?
and more). For more on what she aims to accomplish in her not uncontroversial writing for children, see this interview by Rob Capriciosso.Q: You're feeling hopeful?
Yes, because I have a history in my head. I remember the way it was. I remember going out in Loraine, Ohio and picking up coal from the railroad tracks and putting it in a bucket. Out there would be Mexican people, Italian people. We were all doing the same thing. Stealing coal was what it was. Poor people were what we were. But if someone had difficulties, they were helped. Children were taken in. It didn't matter where you came from. I know the fiber of the country.
HANSEN: Where do you think this is going now?
Dr. AL-ASWANY: I think now everything is clear. We have one major problem: that Mr. Mubarak has not been convinced yet to resign. I spent two days and even more with the protestors. And I even made some speeches to the protestors. And nobody wants to hear anything except that Mubarak must go.
Far from trying to transform Egypt into a theocracy, as Arab rulers and western ideologues predicted they would, the Brotherhood fully embraced the principles of democracy by creating political alliances with liberal intellectuals and secular democrats in the Egyptian to lobby for greater political freedoms, including freedom of religion, assembly and speech. Their actions convinced even their staunchest critics that, given the opportunity, they could become a legitimate political force in Egyptian politics, which is why Mubarak turned so violently against them, rounding up their democratically elected members, jailing, torturing and murdering them inside his dank, sadistic prison cells.In the early 1990s, the Pasadena chapter of Amnesty International worked on behalf of one of those jailed, possibly tortured, Brotherhood sympathizers. It's long past time to see that era come to an end. Don't forget to check in with Amnesty International USA for appropriate Egypt actions!
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.
For a little extra inspiration, check out this clip from a Fox Business News interview with Rights Readers author Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking
) made in the wake of the tragedy in Tuscon where she does a little pre-emptive lobbying against the death penalty for Jared Loughner. (Don't let "Fox" scare you, the interviewer closes by calling her a national treasure - I agree!)
This month we are reading Reza Aslan's 
No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. The author has such a comprehensive website, I'm tempted to just refer you there-- or take the short cut to his YouTube channel or Daily Beast columns and find the topics that interest you most. Here are a few more pointers: After seven years on television and in the op-ed pages, how would you rate your effectiveness in shedding light on Islam?While seeing him this discouraged makes you want to reach out and offer a big ol' Rights Readers solidarity hug, this makes me really curious about what direction he will be headed in at the All Saints event!
To be honest, you caught me at a weird time. I’ve spent most of this last decade writing books and articles and doing media appearances and working with organizations and interfaith councils. I’ve been essentially doing my best, or at least my duty, in trying to educate people and provide them with the information they need to hopefully reframe their perceptions not just of Islam but the Middle East—a part of the world that has been misunderstood as monolithic and unchanging. And what I’ve concluded over the last three or four months with this unprecedented wave of anti-Muslim sentiment, or Islamophobia—whatever you want to call it that has gripped this country and become disturbingly mainstream—is that I’ve completely wasted my time. I could write a dozen books and do a hundred interviews on every media channel in the world, and I am not going to shape the way people think as effectively as I would if I could just focus on what I really want to do, which is storytelling.
Aslan's latest book is an anthology Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. You can sample it at Words Without Borders. WNYC interviews him about the book and other issues in the news including Islamophobia and the Park 51 project. In this Guernica interview, he talks at length about the book, the power of literature and the internet to erase borders and create new communities. Also a bit of news, No God But God will be out in February in a Young Adult version.| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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For April we have chosen Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo,A chilling political thriller set at the end of Peru's grim war between Shining Path terrorists and a morally bankrupt government counterinsurgency.
Associate District Prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a by-the-book prosecutor wading through life. Two of his greatest pleasures are writing mundane reports and speaking to his long-dead mother. Everything changes, however, when he is asked to investigate a bizarre and brutal murder: the body was found burnt beyond recognition and a cross branded into its forehead. Adhering to standard operating procedures, Chacaltana begins a meticulous investigation, but when everyone he speaks to meets with an unfortunate and untimely end, he realizes that his quarry may be much closer to home. With action rising in chorus to Peru’s Holy Week, Red April twists and turns racing toward a riveting conclusion.
