A Look Back on "A Long Way Gone"

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
Hardcover, 229 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Price: $22.00
Published: 2007


When Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier was published in February 2007, it jumped straight to the number two position on The New York Times bestseller list. Nearly every national newspaper and popular magazine praised A Long Way Gone for its emotional intensity and unvarnished portrayal of depravity. Beah's harrowing story of being forcibly recruited at age 13 into the Sierra Leone army garnered critical acclaim from accomplished writers like Steve Coll, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Ghost Wars (2004); Sebastian Junger (A Death in Belmont, 2007; The Perfect Storm, 1997); and Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle, 2005).

According to Jeff Seroy, a Farrar, Straus & Giroux spokesperson, A Long Way Gone sold close to 700,000 copies in hardcover upon its release. Time placed it on its top ten list of the finest nonfiction books of 2007. It won two awards from the Young Adult Library Services Association: one, an Alex Award, which is given to adult books that have teen appeal; the other, a Best Books for Young Adults prize. The Quills, an awards program that honors the year’s most entertaining and enlightening titles, nominated A Long Way Gone as 2007's best Biography/Memoir and Beah as Debut Author of the Year. A Long Way Gone was published in paperback in August 2008.

And for Beah, 2007 was a year of constant conversation about his war-torn Sierra Leone, the brutal attack on his family that left him orphaned and homeless at age 12, and his role as a boy soldier who killed and tortured rebels from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) while drugged-up on amphetamines, cocaine, brown brown (a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder) and marijuana. The year also brought about a media blitz. Appearances on television and radio programs worldwide put a face and voice to a story that's as astounding as it is disturbing and catapulted Beah to international recognition. And though this fame was born out of Beah's cataclysmal loss of childhood innocence and the tragedy of his diminished humanity, it has rewarded Beah—and the world at large.

Beah gave the keynote address at the Global Young Leaders Conference in July 2007, and was named United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Advocate for Children Affected by War in November 2007. He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division Committee and has spoken at the United Nations about the his experience as a child soldier to raise public awareness of the estimated 300,000 children engaged in warfare throughout the globe. In 2008, he co-founded the Network of Young People Affected by War (NYPAW) with a mission to raise awareness of the plight of children in conflict zones, encourage an end to hostilities, and offer role models for children who are currently striving to recover from war.

“One of the most significant changes in my life has been the ability to tell my story for the benefit of others,” Beah said in an interview available on UNICEF's website. "I’ve dedicated my life to … [making] sure that what happened to me doesn’t continue to happen to other children around the world."

As Beah shows in A Long Way Gone becoming a child soldier is not an act of will. It is an act of survival. Children who've had their families murdered or been separated from them after a violent raid of their homes and villages have no where to go, no one to care for them, no guidance, no water or food, no sanctuary from harm. Because these children lack every essential need, joining a military group—whether it's the Sierra Leone army whose purpose is to defend their country and destroy the rebels or the RUF whose motivation is to annihilate the army and all civilians hostile to their cause—provides them protection, a sense of belonging, clothing, an end to their petrifying isolation. The group becomes the children's surrogate family, and the children will do that which is demanded of them to remain within the confines of that security. Methodically, they are conditioned by the groups' commanders to annihilate with impunity—after all, as the children are continually reminded, they're exacting revenge on the enemy who killed their families.

When Beah's village in Mogbwemo was attacked in 1993, he and his brother, Junior, were on a 16-mile walk to Mattru Jong to participate in a talent show. Beah and friends had created a rap and dance group, and Naughty By Nature, Heavy D & The Boyz, LL Cool J, and Run-D.M.C. were their icons. They learned of the attack the next day, but knew nothing of the fate of their parents or brother, Ibrahim. They knew it was too dangerous to return to Mogbwemo, or even to remain in Mattru Jong. Rumors circulated that it was the next village to be attacked. Within weeks, the RUF advanced on Mattru Jong, and Beah, Junior, and four friends fled the assault of machine gun bullets and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). One of the villagers who was running behind Beah as they escaped into the bush "caught the fragments of [an] RPG. He cried out loudly and screamed that he was blind. No one dared to … help him. He was halted by another grenade that exploded, causing his remains and blood to sprinkle like rain on the nearby leaves and bushes." Terrorized, Beah and friends ran for over an hour to escape Mattru Jong.

They wandered for weeks from one abandoned village to the next barren town, searching for sustenance or the familiar face of a villager who might know the whereabouts of their families. While in the village of Kamator, where the boys spent three months helping farmers plant crops, the rebels launched a nighttime raid. Beah was separated from his friends—and he never saw Junior again.

It's best to read the rest of Beah's riveting story rather than to have any more detail revealed in this column. Beah's memoir is direct and unflinching and deeply personal. To read it is to experience it—and oftentimes, a pause is needed to stomach its depiction of cruelty.

A Long Way Gone brought Ishmael Beah to great heights in 2007. However, 2008 plagued him with controversy. An article titled "Africa's War Child" appeared in The Australian newspaper and reported "a possible key discrepancy in Beah's story," which, if it is true, undermines his chronology of events as a child soldier. The origin of the newspaper's investigation—as conducted by Peter Wilson, the London-based Europe correspondent—was a noble attempt to clarify statements made by a Sierra Leonean who claimed to be Beah's father. However, once the newspaper scrutinized Beah's assertions and suggested that A Long Way Gone misrepresented facts, the proverbial "can of worms" was pried opened—and the child soldier who at one time won a killing exhibition contest by slicing open a prisoner's throat with his bayonet shifted once again into self-protection mode. Beah released a statement addressing the The Australian's accusations in January 2008. You can read it here.

Despite Beah's pointed attempt to legitimize his story and tamp down the claims that he mislead readers, more bad press came his way. The UK's The Sunday Times published an article by Bryan Appleyard in February 2008, which exposed Beah's school documents as reported by Wilson in The Australian and again questioned the veracity of Beah's timeline.

"A clear possibility [for continued inquiry]," Appleyard writes, "is that the sheer success of the book and the celebrity of its author is driving a combination of envy and, in the small world of Sierra Leone, a desire to be part of the story.

"If you go round waving a book in Sierra Leone and asking, 'Who knows this person?' somebody is going to say, 'Of course, that’s my son or could be my brother,' who knows?," Beah explains. "I don’t worry about it. For me, my story is accurate and I presented it accurately and I stand by it. I’m not worried about it.”

Portions of this book review appeared originally in MotherTown in February 2008.

Do You Remember "How the Republicans Stole Christmas" and That "The War on Christmas" Is Underway?

Bill Press is “mad as hell”: con-
servative Christians within the Republican Party have declared a monopoly on religion. John Gibson is convinced there’s a conspiracy among liberals to ban Christmas and, by extension, Christianity itself. There isn’t much upon which these two high-profile commentators agree, and you can see and hear them espousing their brand of politics just about anytime you’d like: Press hosts the radio program The Bill Press Show, is a political analyst on MSNBC, and author of Spin This!: All the Ways We Don’t Tell the Truth (2001); Gibson is host of the FOX Radio program The John Gibson Show and author of Hating America: The New World Sport (2004).

In their Christmas-season commentaries on religion and its place in society and government, it’s no surprise that their views are equally divergent. Take, for example, the manner in which Press and Gibson opine on the country’s divisiveness, using the au courant color-coded system popularized after the 2004 presidential election. Press writes:

As spiritual leader, [conservative Christians] look to President George W. Bush: a man, they believe, God Himself placed in the White House. Displaying a total lack of Christian humility, Bush says he shares their belief.

Faith in God, which used to be the common thread uniting almost all Americans, is now portrayed as the exclusive province of the GOP. Ignoring the fact that [Senator John] Kerry won millions of votes in red states—and Bush, in blue states—the media pundits would have us believe that election 2004 proved that there are two kinds of Americans: red-staters, who worship God, love America, and voted for President Bush; and blue-staters, who worship the devil, hate America, and voted for Senator Kerry. . . . [T]hose who live in red states thrive in the godly, moral values of Jesus. Those who live in the blue states wallow in the filthy, permissive amorality of Hollywood.

Well, I don’t buy any of it—and that’s why I wrote this book.

Gibson writes:

You might assume that [the war on Christmas] is being fought in blue states, bastions of liberalism and multiculturalism, where anything traditional, Christian, or Western is a target. But the war on Christmas is broader than you can imagine. . . . As you will read in [my book], Christmas is under attack in bright red states such as Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, and Indiana.

. . . The wagers of this war . . . are a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians. . . . These [“backers of the war”] are the churches that marry gays and turn their backs on preborn babies. Their congregants vote for John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and Barney Frank. . . . These are the people who fly over the masses they seek to dictate to, crisscrossing the country back and forth from Hollywood to New York City, who . . . are certain that the people who voted for George Bush want to install a Christian Taliban as custodians of the levers of power.

Gibson and Press rely on the U.S. Constitution to establish their viewpoints. Gibson, whose book is limited to the celebration of Christmas and whose tone stings with more severity than Press’s, cites regularly the First Amendment, from which the principle of separation of church and state derives. Gibson shows how school superintendents, city managers, and state boards of education misinterpret this Amendment—and indeed, break the law— when they institute bans on Christmas and its expression. Such prohibitions include the use of the colors red and green within a public school district (Chapter 4: “Plano, Texas: A Red and Green-Free Zone”), putting up Christmas trees in municipal buildings (Chapter 5: “Eugene, Oregon: ‘Therefore, We Decided to Ban Them’ “), and use of the word “Christmas” on a school calendar (Chapter 1: “Covington, Georgia: “ ‘We Couldn’t Call It Christmas’ “).

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that these symbols and activities are secular, not religious, and that, as part of the First Amendment they do not violate constitutional law even if they appear or occur in the public arena.

Gibson explains that widespread adherence to political correctness, tolerance and diversity, and avoidance of potentially offensive practices trigger this pervasive “hostility” toward Christianity. And he adds to his aforementioned list of miscreants the American Civil Liberties Union and the Americans for the Separation of Church and State, the “left-wing” institutions that maneuver this battle.

Whether or not you agree that Christmas and Christianity are under siege or find Gibson’s characterization of the war-wagers accurate or hysterical, many insights can be drawn from his book. One in particular is exemplary: “ ‘If a Catholic is offended by a star of David, or a crescent and star, wouldn’t the right corrective be to educate the Catholic and get him out of his dim-wittedness and his bigotry [rather than censor that which offends him]?’ “

In his insightful, smart, and commonsensical book, Bill Press raises “a number of critical questions about the proper intersection between religion and politics.” His focus is broad, and along with the Constitution, he references extensively the Bible—both the Old and New Testaments—to show how conservative Christians preach the Bible but “[ignore] the most important teachings of Jesus, which place love and compassion above greed and intolerance.”

Having a degree in Theology and spending 10 years in the seminary studying for the priesthood, Press’s Bible-talk is authentic; it is not puffed-up rhetoric used to justify his opinions. Press takes the Christian conservatives’ political agenda, which is based on Scripture and the Gospels and which they believe is mandated by God, and breaks it down to illustrate the misconstruing of essential Biblical teachings, the hypocrisy, the false claims that often go unchecked.

Press’s comparing-and-contrasting is impressive, and he doesn’t side-step any of the challenging moral, ethical, and social issues facing our nation. He tackles abortion, the environment, the death penalty, homosexuality, gay marriage, the waging of a “just” war according to traditional Judeo-Christian requirements, stem cell research, education, health care, and poverty—all within a religious and moral context.

Like Gibson, Press has his list of troublemakers. They include Rev. Jerry Falwell (now deceased), Rev. Pat Robertson, a “handful of Catholic bishops,” and James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. He derides Dobson’s institution, the American Southern Baptist Convention, and the Christian Coalition of America. Press also uses a fair amount of sarcasm in his observations, yet it is not acrid or mean-spirited.

One goal of Press’s book is to generate “an honest discussion . . . about how to arrive at the proper balance between religion and politics.” (Common ground between Gibson and Press?) Another is to inspire Democrats to reclaim the moral high ground, which they’d held for decades― Think of FDR, Press says― but relinquished. They can achieve this, first, by acknowledging that religion does have a place in politics, and second, by “getting comfortable again talking about faith, moral values, and God. Until we do, however, Democrats will remain a minority party.”

Happy Holidays to the readers of “Off the Bookshelf.”

Portions of this book review appeared in MotherTown in December 2005.

The Legacy of Anne Frank: 65 Years of Wonderment and Inspiration

In August 1944, diarist Anne Frank and her seven companions-in-hiding were arrested by the Nazi Gestapo in Amsterdam. Shortly thereafter, most of the group was transferred to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. With the Soviet liberation of Poland in progress in the fall of 1944, Anne and her sister, Margot, were selected for labor duty because of their youth and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Both sisters contracted typhus and died in March 1945. Their deaths occurred only weeks before British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen in April.

For the last 65 years, Anne Frank and The Diary of a Young Girl, her disquieting chronicle of seclusion and human spiritedness published in 1947, have never been absent from the world's consciousness. Whether it is because Anne Frank represents innocence and morality in a time of vicious brutality or because the pages she composed capture the essence of human forbearance, there exists an enduring desire to remember her and a constant endeavor to comprehend the magnitude of her suffering.

To that end, Anne's seminal work was adapted into a play in 1955, with the movie version following in 1959. The book has been translated into dozens of languages, and new scholarly editions of the diary, which critique the craft of Anne's writing and analyze sections omitted from the original publication, are published with some regularity.

Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife by Francine Prose is the most recent contribution to the study of Anne Frank. In her book, Prose posits that "Anne crafted a memoir that has become one of the most compelling documents of modern history.... [With] ever-increasing maturity, she described life in vivid, unforgettable detail, explored apparently irreconcilable views of human nature—people are good at heart but capable of unimaginable evil—and grappled with the unfolding events of World War II, until the hidden attic was raided....

And Prose addresses what few of the diary's millions of readers may know: this book is a "deliberate" work of art. During her last months in hiding, Anne Frank furiously revised and edited her work, crafting a piece of literature that she had hoped would be read by the public after the war.

Read it has been. Few books have been as influential for as long, and Prose thoroughly investigates the diary's unique afterlife: the obstacles and criticism Otto Frank faced in publishing his daughter's words; the controversy surrounding the diary's Broadway and film adaptations; and the claims of conspiracy theorists who have cried fraud, along with the scientific analysis that proved them wrong. Finally, Prose, a teacher herself, considers the rewards and challenges of sharing one of the world's most read, and most banned, books with students.

How has the life and death of one girl become emblematic of the lives and deaths of so many, and why do her words continue to inspire? Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife tells the extraordinary story of the book that became a force in the world. Along the way, Francine Prose definitively establishes that Anne Frank was not an accidental author or a casual teenaged chronicler, but a writer of prodigious talent and ambition." (Courtesy of Brookline Booksmith)

Francine Prose appeared recently on C-SPAN's BookTV to discuss her book. You can watch her presentation by clicking on this link: Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife

While Anne Frank's influence and significance are often evaluated within the genre of nonfiction, her story— as well as the story of those who hid with her— inspired Ellen Feldman to write the speculative The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (2005). Selected as a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ choice,” Feldman's novel is inventive and uniquely provocative. As the book review columnist for the former publication MotherTown, I reviewed The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank. Here is that review:

Peter van Pels was born on November 8, 1926. He was a German Jewish refugee who, along with his parents Hermann and Auguste, went into hiding with Anne Frank during the Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands. The van Pels joined Anne’s parents, Otto and Edith Frank; her sister, Margot; and Fritz Pfeffer in the “Secret Annexe” in July 1942.

In The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank—one of the world’s most widely read books that recounts what daily life was like during the two years the group spent in hiding—Anne relates that she and Peter, to whom she gave the pseudonym Peter van Daan, developed a deep friendship and a romantic attraction for each other. Anne wrote: “I . . . never had someone I could confide in. . . . I’m so lonely and now I’ve found comfort!” And, it was Peter who gave Anne her first kiss.

On August 4, 1944, the Grüne Polizei, (a division of the Security Service) stormed the group’s hiding place and arrested everyone. The men and women were separated—never to see each other again—and transported to concentration camps. Hermann van Pels was gassed at Auschwitz in October 1944. Auguste van Pels died sometime in April 1945, either during the forced march to a military base in Czechoslovakia or shortly after arriving. Fritz Pfeffer died of starvation at Neuengamme in December 1944. Edith Frank died of malnutrition at Auschwitz in January 1945—twenty-one days before the Red Army liberated the camp. Margot died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945. Anne, also at Bergen-Belsen, died of the same disease within days of Margot and within weeks of the camp’s liberation on April 15 by British troops. It is not known whether Peter van Pels died during a forced march out of Auschwitz or perished at Mauthausen sometime between April and May 1945. Otto Frank was the sole survivor.

In 1994, author Ellen Feldman (Lucy, 2003) visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. A guide remarked during the tour that there are records that document the fate of all of the inhabitants of the Secret Annexe except for one: Peter van Pels. Feldman’s “imagination was captured” by this mythical possibility: “If this young man did not die with the others, I speculated, what might he have go on to?”

Feldman discovered during the research for this novel that the tour guide was either “misinformed or romantically inclined” and that Peter indeed died; but by the time Feldman made this finding, “Peter van Pels had been living in [her] mind for several years.”

So, Feldman stayed with the premise that Peter survived. The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank is Feldman's marvelous, speculative tale of the life that Peter van Pels may have created for himself after World War II. It is a terrific novel, one that captures our imaginations and forces us to question how much of our memories and our pasts should we allow to define and influence our present. Can we even escape our pasts? And what do they become if we deliberately alter our memories of them? Did they still happen, or have we transformed them from being a part of our reality to being a part of our imagination?

The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank begins in 1952. Peter is the narrator. He has been in the United States for six years, and no one knows anything about his past. He disavows being Jewish. He is 26-years-old; happily married; a father; an American citizen. He is edgy, sarcastic, circumspect, and apprehensive.

We first meet him during a session at his psychiatrist’s office. Peter has lost his voice. Dr. Gabor plies Peter with questions in order to ascertain the cause of this odd state of speechlessness. Peter whispers curt, evasive responses, deflecting Dr. Gabor’s prying for fear that his answers will reveal too much of the Peter van Pels that he once was.

In his mind, though, Peter replays the history and events with which he has had to reckon since leaving Amsterdam and arriving in America. Silently, in his monologue, he tells us of the “spitefulness” of memory: “[M]y existence before [“my current life”] is a mystery. Even when I’m trying to remember it I have difficulty. . . . I know certain facts about my life. I can even put them together in sequence, because that must be the way they occurred. But I have no recollection of when things happened, or where they happened, or even if they happened to me or someone else. I was born six years ago in a customs shed on the Hudson River. I was conceived a year before that on a lightening-charged night in a dung-smelling barn somewhere in Germany. Any previous existence is a rumor I overheard. Instead of memory, I have instincts; in place of a past, I have this inexplicable, ill-gotten, entirely remarkable present.”

Peter also remarks on the mild, “palliative” language used to “keep the unthinkable at bay,” “all-purpose” words spoken by people who know nothing about torment to describe the horrors of a world beyond imagination. He confides that “Home” is one of his favorite English words..

We soon discover the reason for Peter’s lost voice. It has to do with the publication of Anne’s diary and its subsequent adaptations into a play and a movie—both of which misrepresent actual events. The deprivation and brute misery that Peter endured has become the stuff of casual conversation and entertainment. The popularity of the attic-dwellers’ plight is unavoidable—Peter’s own wife is fascinated by the story—and Peter is beset by reminders of his past and tortured by the distortion of facts.

Having his history publicized is a threat that provokes the near-breakdown of Peter’s fabricated world and identity. We become engrossed in Peter’s telling of his desperation; his attempts to keep his two worlds from colliding; his rage at having to confront Anne’s fame, a celebrity status that he finds perverse; his fractured memories of what happened in the attic versus the “pack of lies” that the play and movie maintain.

Should he reveal the truth? he wonders. Would his “cosmic sin” be forgiven? How long can he hide behind the pseudonym Anne gave him? Should he tell his wife? If he does, what could he expect her response to be?: “Would she tell me to stop joking, because this is not a laughing matter? Would she believe me? And if she did, then what? Would she take me to her bosom? Would she shoulder my suffering? Would she slip the silvery key of her love, brightly polished like all the silver in the house, into the lock of my past and twist it?”

Accompanying Peter as he meanders through the muck and anguish of his present and tries not to let the recollections of those harrowing days and nights in hiding consume him is a remarkable journey upon which we gladly embark. Feldman has given us a tremendous character in Peter. He is marked by trauma, but he is not stymied by it. He has seen humanity’s wickedness, yet he believes in, and treasures, love. Feldman imbues Peter van Pels with an authenticity seldom encountered in contemporary historical fiction, and the narrative she has created captivates. The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank is an outstanding success. It is an unforgettable story.

Return to "Caracol Beach": Eliseo Alberto's International Literary Accomplishment

Caracol Beach by Eliseo Alberto, Translated by Edith Grossman
Hardcover, 286 pages
Published by: Alfred A. Knopf
Price: $25
Publication Date: 2000



In the "conservative," "fashionable" resort community of Caracol Beach, Florida, a madman prepares to unleash his fury. Memories of combat and the loss of his cadre of infantrymen torture Beto Milanés, a former Cuban soldier in the Angola war of the `70s and `80s. He wants to put an end to his life, to stop the feelings of guilt which haunt him, but he's unable to bring himself to commit the act. On this strange, random, and important Saturday night Milanés sets out on the prowl, determined to find someone to kill him.

Winner of Spain's distinguished International Alfaguara Prize in Fiction Caracol Beach is a masterful blend of suspense, creativity, intrigue, woe, and magical realism. In his own words Cuban-born Eliseo Alberto describes his novel as a story about "fear, madness, innocence, forgiveness, and death." And he dedicates Caracol Beach to his "dear maestro, Gabriel Garcia Márquez—the writing world's most well known magical realist.

The novel's characters include aging police chief, Sam Ramos; his estranged transvestite son, Mandy; the overeager new police officer, Wellington Perales; the lonely wino gymnastics teacher, Agnes MacLarty; and the three unfortunate high school graduates whom Milanés drags into his night of mayhem: Laura, the cheerleader beauty queen; Martin, the inexperienced studious one; and Tom, the jock.

All are feisty and believable, and Alberto is adept at getting you to feel a certain kind of tenderness for them. That their destinies meet on this one dreadful night is a disturbing acknowledgment of life's chaos and unpredictability.

Even the "madman" Milanés—whose sorrowful history we learn by reading snippets from his "Soldier's Notebook"—cannot be entirely hated. Milanés wanted to be a pitcher on a Havana baseball team, until he broke his elbow. "Damn, I could have been a great pitcher," he says. But now, "I'm crazy."

If memories of war destroy one's soul, if fighting "with suicidal valor under unfavorable circumstances" eliminates peace of mind, can one be blamed for wanting an escape? For Milanés the uncertainty of the memories that he cannot rectify causes the worst turmoil:

"At the beginning of his exile at Caracol Beach, his past ... would appear withou warning: a torrential downpour at dawn ... or the sudden smell of pencil wood, was enoug to ruin the day with the echoes of many questions that had no satisfactory answers because they depended on the possibility of a return that was absolutely forbidden him. The nights turned kaleidoscopic and the soldier grew dizzy on the carousel of remembrance. Memory left him adrift."

When Laura, Tom, and Martin meet up with Milanés, the teen-aged trio are on a typical errand to buy more beer for their spur-of-the-moment high school graduation party at Martin's parents' resort home in Caracol Beach. Martin had assured everyone that the house had "enough beer to make all the firemen in St. Petersburg drunk." He was wrong.

Alberto's simple statement that follows Martin's boast—"He wouldn't live long enough to regret that sentence"—embodies the deeply moving and philosophical moments of Caracol Beach when we are reminded of how fleeting our innocence is.

Milanés ambushes the group, gives the orders for his suicide-by-proxy to the boys, and kidnaps Laura. The boys go off to get weapons; they arrive at the auto salvage yard where the soldier makes his home, prepared to do the deed. The absurdity of chance plays itself out again, and tragedy prevails.

Alberto's writing is crisp, distinctive, evocative, and filled with wisdom.
Alberto can wax poetic, as in: ". . . the only way to confront with relative success a life
besieged . . . . is to invent for ourselves a love at any price, do you see? Some kind of
solidarity . . . an alliance . . . . And all you can do is defend that love, kicking and scratching, even if it turns out to be an illusion bigger than the moon."

And he sets scene and character simply and vividly: "Sam shaved his head . . . . On that Saturday in June he gashed the back of his ear. A warm trickle of blood rolled down his neck and spread over his right nipple. His hand wasn't what it used to be. Neither was his patience. One of these mornings he'd end up slitting his throat."

Caracol Beach gives us a world where the triumphs and perils of being human are tested in one night of terror. It's a place where love exits and hatred looms; where forgiveness is granted and guilt persists; where death comes and life follows; where acceptance goes forth and fear overruns; where darkness falls and dawn arrives.

Caracol Beach is a modern-day, dreamlike, sometimes outrageous tale, and Alberto has achieved a significant international literary accomplishment.

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in 2000.

Suzan-Lori Parks's Hurly-Burly: "Getting Mother's Body"

Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks
Hardcover, 257 pages
Publisher: Random House
Price: $23.95
Publication Date: 2003



Suzan-Lori Parks's Getting Mother's Body grabs you with its opening line—" 'Where my panties at?' I asks him."—and holds you until its very last word. You are quickly drawn in to the hurly-burly lives of Parks's quirky characters. And like any good story, film, or play that has you invested in its drama, anxious for the action to unfold, Getting Mother's Body piques your curiosity. You need to know what's going to happen next in this offbeat, intriguing tale of family, deprivation, camaraderie, and perseverance.

Set in Lincoln, Texas, in 1963, Getting Mother's Body revolves around the snappy, ever-resourceful, 16-year-old, Billy Beede. She's "five months gone," and the hump of her "baby-belly" can no longer go unnoticed. People in town are talking about how she's "growd almost to womanhood, also growd as big as a house with no ring on her finger and no man in sight." But, Billy thinks, she'll have the last laugh on those "biddies" and their talk, because she just got a marriage proposal from her coffin-selling-businessman-boyfriend, Clifton Snipes.

The lead-up to Billy's nuptials introduces the novel's other cast of characters. There is Billy's uncle, Roosevelt "Teddy" Beede, and her aunt and Teddy's wife, June. There's Laz Jackson, a somewhat slow-witted, though steadfast ally who's sweet on Billy. There's Dill Smiles, a "bulldagger" who likes her overalls and boots and lives her life as a man. Last but not least, there is Willa Mae Beede, Billy's deceased mother and Teddy's sister who is an overarching presence in the characters' thoughts, memories, and motivations. Willa Mae is the linchpin in the uproarious and eccentric adventure that this tapped-out, luckless group is about to undertake.

Parks acquaints you with this entertaining bunch by letting them speak for themselves. She uses an unconventional, difficult-to-do literary technique in which each character narrates his or her own chapter. For this effective shifting in point of view, Parks and her novel have been likened to William Faulkner and his masterwork As I Lay Dying (1930).

This is not an overblown comparison. Getting Mother's Body's down-home wisdom; steady and well-paced movement toward its gratifying climax; and memorable, afflicted characters hearken back to Faulkner's similarly moving Southern tale of a mother's death and its aftermath on her family.

Willa Mae Beede died six years ago. Throughout those arduous years, times have been tough on the Beedes. Earnings have been lean. Teddy and June operate a filling station on a month-to-month basis, an agreement on which the owner insists. They sleep in a trailer behind the station. Billy lives with them, but she sleeps on a pallet under the cash register counter.

According to family legend, when Willa Mae died, she was buried with a "treasure" of her favorite jewelry. Teddy and June have toyed with the idea of digging up Willa Mae's body to retrieve the treasure. The money they could get for it would surely help out. June, who lost a leg when she was a child, could buy a prosthesis for herself, and Teddy could bury Willa Mae in the same cemetery as their parents.

Dill Smiles has been dead set against this fandango of an idea. She and Willa Mae were lovers. When death came early and tragically for Willa Mae, Dill prepared Willa Mae's body and buried her on Dill's mother's property in Arizona.

Dill protests: " 'Willa Mae was proud of two things. Her pearl necklace and her diamond ring. Getting buried with them two things was her dying wish. I coulda took them, I coulda stole them from her while she was breathing her last breaths, but I weren't about to go against her dying wish. So I put her in the ground and I put her jewelry in the ground with her...."

And then, a letter arrives from Candy Napoleon, Dill's mother, stating that developers plan to plow up and pave over a parcel of land she sold to them. Willa Mae's grave is in that section, and digging is soon to begin.

The Beedes must decide what to do. Cautiously, June pipes up: " 'If we ever was thinking we should go get Willa Mae's body, we better go and get her now,' I says. I make sure I say 'body' and not 'treasure.' "

And Billy throws in her two cents: " 'Willa Mae's getting paved over don't bother me none....[I]f they gonna put a supermarket on top of her, I ain't wasting my honeymoon running out there trying to stop them.' "

Billy doesn't have much use for Willa Mae or her memory. Right now, she's fixated on the wedding dress she finagled out of Mrs. Jackson at Jackson's Formal and scraping together bus fare so she can travel to Texhoma and get married. She takes off to join Clifton—encountering a bevy of one-of-a-kind characters along the way—and is met with a most unexpected situation upon her arrival.

Getting Mother's Body really kicks in gear after Billy's episode. Money—or more precisely, the lack of it—is foremost in the minds of the Beedes. Scrounging around for any coin or bill that they can come up with will not do for their immediate expenses, especially Billy's.

Also, time is dwindling in the matter of Willa Mae's resting place. The Beedes decide to go dig up Willa Mae. A humdinger of a road trip ensues, replete with fast-moving vehicles, scuffles with the law, shotguns, secrets revealed, and more Beedes.

Parks's wild, cunning tale is terrific, and it rings with truth. She shows how people on the receiving end of bad luck and miserable circumstances can persevere. They may not triumph grandly, but they do endure.

Suzan-Lori Parks was the recipient of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog. Spike Lee directed her first feature film, Girl 6. Parks is currently writing adaptations of the musical Hoopz for Disney and Toni Morrison's novel Paradise for Oprah Winfrey. Getting Mother's Body is Parks's debut novel.






This book review was originall published in MotherTown in 2003.

Revisiting "Five Thousand Days Like This One": A Deeply Felt Chronicle of Family and the Significance of Its History

Five Thousand DaysLike This One: An American Family History by Jane Brox
Paperback, 182 pages
Published by: Houghton Mifflin Company
Price: $13
Publication Date: 2000

Jane Brox’s Five Thousand Days Like This One is a melancholic and beautiful celebration of her family’s farming history in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts. Brox weaves together the historical records of the mill cities of Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts; citations from Henry David Thoreau’s nature and travel writings; conversations and family stories memorized from childhood; and her own elegantly simple chronicle of life. These variations make Five Thousand Days Like This One a wonderful portrait of rural life as it once was and encroaching urban sprawl as it threatens now.

Nominated for 1999’s best nonfiction book award by the National Book Critics Circle Five Thousand Days Like This One has moved beyond its dedicated small-town appeal. It’s been given a national spotlight—and thankfully so. This book matters because it lays down history and memory and delivers them to us for our present-day consideration. It reflects on New England farming and preserves for the record the routines of this nearly bygone way of life—the “sturdy, self-contained world that spoke for hope”—before it passes into the way things were.

As the book begins, Brox, subdued by the death of her 85-year-old father, sits at his desk, trying to figure out how “to carry on the workings of his home and farm.” Her father’s “three houses, forty cleared acres, a hundred in woodland, and a dozen in fruit trees” are hers now, and Brox is faced with working out the tangle of her new responsibilities. She decides which seeds to order for the spring planting, travels to the apple orchards of the Nashoba Hills to share trade ideas with fellow orchard growers, and gets ideas on how to better arrange the family farm stand. In the process, Brox realizes with keen sadness that change and the future can obliterate identity, memory, and perhaps even whole lifetimes:

And then a day comes when I have to erase [my father’s] name from
another account. First it was the checking account, then the Agway
charge, and the Harris Seed charge. Sometimes it feels as if I’m erasing
him everywhere until his name will remain only in his last place, on
the hill, behind the white birch. I hate it, both the erasure and my
realization that if we are going to go on I can’t make the same decisions
he would have made….I’m thinking of selling a piece of far land as
soon as the market’s better….

…Always the future is its own bewilderment, and has its own
rewards and sorrows. Not long at all since my father died, and
already I sometimes feel he wouldn’t fit back into this world, that
we’ve arranged our lives beyond him.

In chapters that meditate on the immigration of her Syrian grandparents to Lawrence—the nineteenth century’s “worsted and woolen capital of the world”—and the story of the Merrimack Valley’s textile mills, sewing factories, dams, and boarding houses Brox packs a lot of history in a short space. She writes about this “Immigrant City” with its fifty or so languages and dialects, the workers’ strike of 1912, and her father’s boyhood recollections of Armistice Day in 1918.

Brilliantly rendered is Brox’s chapter of the influenza epidemic of 1918. The Lawrence Board of Health consigned the sick to a “tent hospital” on Tower Hill. There were some days when influenza deaths outnumbered soldier casualties from World War I. With devastating clarity, Brox describes the scene:

…Boardwalks had been laid down between the tents, and footfalls,
softened by the drenched wood, came near and receded. The nuns’
habits swished. What country was this? A cough. A groan. The
stricken tossed in their fevers. Their muscles ached. One moment
they had the sweats; the next, chills. In forty-five different languages
and dialects they ca called for water and warmth.

The valley’s “legacy” is as much a part of Brox's own personal history as her maternal grandfather’s Italian toast “May we all have five thousand days like this one” and the breads of her Syrian culture called simsim and zaatar. Connecting to, and energizing the memory of, one’s complete history—that of place, family, tradition, lifestyle—is Brox’s abiding concern. Where does a loved one’s knowledge go once they’ve passed on, and how can we hold on to the significance of their lives if we don’t know their stories or learn their histories? Similarly, the possessions that adorned a loved one’s life are not trinkets; they are the things that “brought us here and forward,” yet after death they become the “mute things that had lost the one who could best speak for them” and “[f]rom now on they’ll only be partially understood.”

Five Thousand Days Like This One rounds out as a moving tribute to family and its importance. It’s at once joyous and disheartening, for it honors a New England history yet reminds us of its waning tradition.


This book review was originally published in MotherTown in 2000.

Jeff Cronin's ”The Summer Guest": A Masterful Piece of Fiction

The Summer Guest by Justin Cronin
Hardcover, 369 pages
Publisher: The Dial Press
Price: $24
Publication Date: 2004


In the North Woods of Maine, there is a campground situated in the pines. It’s secluded and untouched by the sands of time, a haven for the tenderest of intimacies, a site that can salvage a shattered soul. This special place is backdrop to Justin Cronin’s captivating new novel, The Summer Guest.

The novel’s four principal characters narrate this beautifully written drama of loving, losing and loyalty. Each of them shares their stories in their own chapters. There is Harry Wainwright, a terminally ill, ultra-wealthy businessman. There’s 30-year-old Jordan Patterson, the camp’s fishing guide and winter caretaker. Rounding out the quartet are Joe and Lucy Crosby, husband-and-wife owners of the camp. A fifth and vital character named Kate—The Crosby’s 21-year-old daughter who figures prominently in the characters’ chronicles—narrates a single, decisive chapter.

This method of storytelling—first-person point of view—is a hard-won writing technique, especially when a writer brings multiple characters into the mix. Ensuring that these characters’ tone and idiosyncrasies remain consistent from chapter to chapter requires expertise. Fiction writers who do it well—as Cronin does—create individualized characters who speak directly to you in their own unique voices.

For example, Lucy may narrate an 11-page chapter, in which she relates the flowering of her love affair with Joe, and not appear again for another 60-odd pages. When she picks up her story, you must feel that it is Lucy speaking again— Lucy, with her secrets and heartfelt explanations —and not a carry-over from the previous chapter, which, say, Jordan may have related. If you do not detect an overlap, a melding of voices, then the writer deserves praise. Author Suzan-Lori Parks executed this kind of changeover in viewpoint to great effect in Getting Mother’s Body (2003). For it, she won comparison to William Faulkner. Cronin masters it, too.

And though he may not garner a Faulkneresque parallel, it’s only because of geography and an absent Deep South dialect. The Summer Guest is a Northern tale about Maine and Mainers, after all; and Cronin is as every bit successful at shifting point of view and creating characters with diverse dispositions as his distinguished predecessors.

The Summer Guest takes place in August 1994, and begins with the news that Harry Wainwright is near death and wishes to come to the camp to take one last fishing trip. Harry has been a guest for more than 30 summers. He’s fished there since JFK was in the White House and is, as Jordan says, one of the well-to-do “lifers [who] . . . are the bread and butter of a place like ours ... "

Jordan, Joe, Lucy and Kate are ready for Harry’s stay. They know of his dying wish and concede that the era of Harry Wainwright is coming to a close. Because he’s been a mainstay at the camp for years, Harry’s life is intricately intertwined with the lives of Lucy, Joe and Jordan. The three begin to tell of their experiences with Harry, and in the process they recount their past passions and relationships, disappointments, life-altering decisions and family breakdowns, where fathers play a crucial role. Harry, too, discloses his life history’s poignant recollections.

The characters are all acutely aware that they’re sharing their inner thoughts and divulging guarded memories. In fact, they tell you so: Jordan says, “Everybody has a story, so here is mine—the story of me and Kate and old Harry Wainwright, and the lake and woods where all of this takes place”; Joe imparts, “I wanted . . . to find my life. This is exactly what happened, of course, and that is the part of the story in which Harry Wainwright played his part . . . .”; Lucy states, “There was . . . a cosmic symmetry that could not be refused . . . that was always folded into other loves, and that is the real story of me and Harry Wainwright”; and Harry confides, “I want to tell this story truly, so here it must be said that I also loved another, and how that came to pass: the story in which the married man with the sick wife and the son he does not love enough . . . because he is simply afraid to, permits himself the one, small present he is forbidden. The story in which he is not a hero, not at all."

You, as listener, become enraptured by these appealing characters and their emotional highs and lows. They show you how they’ve learned to love. They show you how they’ve lived with sorrow. They show you their courage and frailty. They give you honesty.

Their reminiscences take you to the 1960s, when Joe and Lucy are high school sweethearts and work summers together at the camp (then owned by Joe’s father) and Harry’s visits to this Maine get-away spot begin. You’re transported to the early `70s, when Harry’s wife, Meredith, dies of a rare disease; Joe avoids the Vietnam draft and jumps to Canada; and Lucy defies the parameters of her life, acknowledging that “never in my life had I done anything so purely on my own.” And, you are a part of this momentous August 1994, as Jordan prepares for Harry’s fishing trip and Kate realizes that she’s falling in love.

Lucy, Joe and Jordan bring you along as they travel to familiar Massachusetts locales, too. Boston and its Back Bay, Charles River, Storrow Drive and Beacon Hill. Cambridge’s Central Square and Harvard University. The former U.S. Army post at Fort Devens and Worcester also receive mention.

The Summer Guest has one villain who appears briefly, the malicious Hank Rogue. And apart from a group of raucous vacationing lawyers—a side storyline that Cronin presents proficiently—there are no finaglers, spoilers or malcontents. To call the novel wholesome is not to suggest that it is stilted or lacks provocative tension. It is graceful and unpretentious. It simply feels real.

Harry, Lucy, Joe, Jordan and Kate are memorable, colorful characters who want to take you into their confidence and seem to feel the better for it. As Harry says, “After so much time, how wonderful finally to say these things. It is as if I have been carrying a heavy suitcase for years and years, only to discover I can simply put it down.”

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in 2004.

April Is Baseball Season: Let's Play Ball!

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in April 2007.

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February Is Black History Month: "The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White"

"One would have to be hard-hearted indeed not to be moved by the big story this book tells . . . or by the little stories it tells of individual Hairstons whose lives reveal so much about what it is to be an American . . . It is scrupulous and honest in all respects, and a powerful testament to what this country, at its best, can be."— Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World






The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wieneck
Paperback, 400 pages
Published by: St. Martin's/Griffin Trade Paperback
Price: $15.95
Publication Date: 2000

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
— James Baldwin

“At a plantation in North Carolina I met the heir to a family of slaveholders, perhaps the largest slaveholders in the South. On the same day, in the library of the old master’s mansion, I met the grandson of one of those slaves. Both men shared the name Hairston,” author Henry Wieneck writes in the introduction of his extraordinary and award-winning family biography The Hairstons.

Winner of the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and Autobiography and recently released in paperback The Hairstons is epic in scope. It tells of a sweeping family saga that spans two centuries—from Revolutionary days to present day—and looks at the legacy of this Southern slaveholding family and how that history connects one generation to the next, how it unites both the white and black members of this huge Hairston clan.

According to Wieneck, the true Hairston history has been hidden under “layers of lies and myth...for almost a century and a half.” Wieneck undertook a seven-year exploration into the past of these two families to “[set] down the memories that still echo” in their minds and souls.He discovered that their story serves as “a parable of redemption” and is ultimately a story of “love and heroism.”

But before Wieneck reached that sunny conclusion, he compared the romanticized notions of the old South most commonly seen in Gone With the Wind— like portrayals to disturbing accounts of the humiliations and cruelties of slavery. He studied the “immense Hairston plantation archive,” which amounts to some 25,000 items; he visited the Hairston plantation territories in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi; and he deciphered slave rosters and tried to “conjure some meaning from the endless litany of the dead.”

Wieneck’s research reveals startling facts about the Hairstons’ vast wealth and power. For example, in 1851 Samuel Hairston of Virginia, “reputedly the largest slaveholder in the South,” possessed land and slaves worth $5 million. And Wieneck found that the pre-Civil War holdings of the family’s combined branches totaled 45 plantations in four states and 10,000 slaves.

To protect this empire “the Hairstons revived one of the old customs of the European nobility—they married each other.” Combining the riches of one branch of the family to the affluence of another branch assured that Hairston property remained within the family. This practice worked well until 1852, when a devastating threat to the family fortune loomed near. Robert Hairston of Mississippi, who “felt misgivings over slavery,” collaborated with the American Colonization Society to free some of his slaves. He took his slave, Elizabeth, as his wife, and sometime between 1845 and 1847, they had a daughter, Chrillis.

When Robert died in 1852, he left all his slaves, plantations, and land holdings to Chrillis—and she was to be set free. As such Chrillis could free as many as 1,000 slaves, “creating a patchwork of free colonies in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi.”

The white Hairstons would not tolerate Robert’s “dismantling” of their dominion. They sought legal injunctions to halt action on the will and claimed Robert was insane. Wieneck soon reached the end of the documentation on these proceedings, and Chrillis had curiously vanished from the historical record.

Had the Hairstons murdered the unacceptable heir, Wieneck wondered? In a dramatic moment of Wieneck’s genealogical research, Chrillis resurfaces and Wieneck shows that “the fates of the two families, white and black, [converge] in that child.”

Despite their efforts to ensure that their wealth and prosperity remained unshakable, it is an ironic twist in the white Hairston history that they saw their own decline. By the end of the Civil War the family’s fortune had been decimated; and for the first time, the patrician Hairstons were obliged to fend for themselves.

In contrast, the black Hairstons made a “triumphant rise . . . from servitude and poverty to take their rightful place in mainstream America.” As Wieneck writes, this is the history of “a remarkable people,” and their story “touches every facet of American endeavor.”

Wieneck introduces readers to Thomas Hairston, a freed slave who fought in the Civil War with the Third United States Colored Calvary and was the unit’s company bugler. We learn the courageous and provocative story of John L. Hairston, a former principal of an all-black school who “defied the segregationists in 1968 and galvanized the black community to topple the ‘separate but equal’ system that had ruled them for their entire lives.”

We meet Jester Hairston, a 1929 graduate of Tufts University, who arranged music for the films Red River and Duel in the Sun and who played Jethro in the film The Alamo starring John Wayne. And we join Joseph Hairston, one of the highest-ranking black attorneys in the federal government and a World War II veteran with the Ninety-second Infantry, as he goes in search of his Hairston roots.

Whether Wieneck is relating the daily toil of an enslaved people as in his chapter “The Lives of the Hairston Slaves;” exposing the disgusting history of the Ku Klux Klan, their practice of lynching, and their murder of a Hairston family member; or describing the 1949 capital punishment case of the “Martinsville 7” his writing is observant and direct. He’s critical when necessary and dedicated to the pursuit of difficult truths.

The Hairstons prevails as a troublesome and enthralling study of a family who “enslaved their own flesh and blood for generations” and of a people who rose from the “dust” of slavery. It exposes ugly scars of injustice and still-unhealed wounds of racism, and it honors the Hairston attempt to transcend the past by embracing it.


This book review was originally published in MotherTown in 2000.

February Is Black History Month: "Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History" by Walter Mosley

Mosley sets history a'shakin'

Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History by Walter Mosley
Hardcover, 118 pages
Published by: The Ballantine Publishing Group
Price: $16.95
Publication Date: 2000

This book review was originally published in The Lancaster Times in 2001.

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February Is for Lovers: Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach: A Novel"

In On Chesil Beach, McEwan channels a thought-provoking intensity into newly-weds and sexual exploration

On Chesil Beach: A Novel by Ian McEwan
Hardcover, 203 pages
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Price: $22
Published: 2007

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in 2007.

It is July 1962 in Dorset, England. Florence Ponting and Edward Mayhew have just wed. The couple is sharing their first meal alone as husband and wife in the honeymoon suite of their hotel at Chesil Beach. A four-poster bed is visible in the room adjacent to their tiny dining room. Florence and Edward are 22-years-old, and they are both virgins.

"Almost strangers," Ian McEwan writes in his 11th novel On Chesil Beach, "they stood, strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status [as a married couple] promised to promote them out of their endless youth — Edward and Florence, free at last! . . . . From these new heights they could see clearly, but they could not describe to each other certain contradictory feelings: They separately worried about the moment, sometime soon after dinner, when their new maturity would be tested, when they would lie down together on the four-poster bed and reveal themselves fully to each other."

The consummation of the Mayhews' marriage is the subject of On Chesil Beach. This topic may seem to be a rather minor idea on which to write a novel, but when it's an idea in the hands of Ian McEwan, who possesses a profound insight into the human condition and is regarded as one of Britain's leading novelists, it takes on a thought-provoking intensity that is anything but trivial.

Incidentally, the only feature of On Chesil Beach that is small is its length. It is 203 pages. Much like a short story or even poetry, this condensed form of writing requires a precise approach. There is not room for unnecessary exposition and weak character development. As a master of fiction, McEwan (Saturday, 2005; Atonement, 2001; Amsterdam, 1998; Enduring Love, 1997) knows this — and more important, he demonstrates it in the two distinct and truly memorable characters he creates and puts at the center of his incisive exploration of sexual intimacy.

For Florence, a classical violinist, and Edward, a lover of blues and English rock who studied history at University College in London, their ideas and opinions about sex are divergent, and neither one of them knows what the other is thinking. Bound by an era when a "conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible," they enter into marriage without ever discussing their expectations and pathways to gratification. They are constrained by their reserve.

Florence is guided by a philosophy that avoids confrontation. "She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start — she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten. Best to keep it simple."

To Edward's way of thinking, life "was not so simple," especially when it came to "engaging with Florence's shyness. He had come to respect it, even revere it, mistake it for a form of coyness, a conventional veil for a richly sexual nature. . . . He persuaded himself that he preferred her this way. He did not spell it out for himself, but her reticence suited his own ignorance and lack of confidence. . . ." Therefore, that moment that promises them "boundless sensual freedom" and "mindless ecstasy" — the essential, seemingly straightforward wedding-night event — is encumbered by decorum and a dearth of communication.

This inability to articulate the most serious stirrings of the heart has far-reaching implications — as McEwan's unwavering talent illustrates from beginning to end and oftentimes in the subtlest language. When reality is built on that which is unspoken, a chasm between what is and what is perceived forms. Everything that follows thereafter is circumscribed; the outcome may not be what is intended or desired, but it is the natural consequence of suppression, of keeping silent. For Florence and Edward, the unspoken seals their fate.

On Chesil Beach is evocative, insightful, and sensual. It may not take long to read, but it will linger in memory long after the last word is read.

February Is Black History Month: "Brothers in Arms" by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

NBA Hall of Famer writes powerful wartime saga







Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII''s Forgotten Heroes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton
Hardcover, 302 pages
Publisher: Broadway Books
Price: $24.95
Published: 2004

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in February 2005.

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February Is for Lovers: Anne Taylor Fleming's "Marriage: A Duet"

The flip-flops and pangs of the wounded heart: Marriage on display in Fleming's master work.

Marriage: A Duet by Anne Taylor Fleming

Hardcover, 181 pages

Publisher: Hyperion

Price: $20

Publication Date: 2003

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in April 2003.

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February Is for Lovers: "Love: A Novel" by Toni Morrison

Love: A Novel by Toni Morrison
Hardcover, 202 pages
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Price: $23.95
Publication Date: 2003

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in February 2004.

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February Is Black History Month: Barack Obama's "The Audacity of Hope"

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama
Hardcover, 384 pages
Publisher: Random House

Price: $25
Published: 2006

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in February 2007.

From the time of its release in October 2006, The Audacity of Hope by U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has ranked high — if not number one — on the best-seller lists of the country's most prominent newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today.

Reasons for this swift success abound. Obama has been placed squarely in the American consciousness since his rousing keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston and his subsequent election to the Senate. His status as the newcomer-to-watch was heightened exponentially on April 18, 2005, when Time magazine cited Obama as one of "The World's Most Influential People." Again, Time aimed a very bright spotlight on the judiciously minded 45-year-old with its Oct. 23, 2006, cover story written by Joe Klein (Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid, 2006; Primary Colors, 1996) and titled: "Why Barack Obama Could Be Our Next President." And last month, Obama quelled rumors and fulfilled expectations by filing papers with the Federal Election Commission to form a presidential exploratory committee. (When Obama announces officially his intention to seek the office of President of the United States in 2008 this month, listen for the discernable buzz that now surrounds him to transform into a fervent roar.)

This fame and glory and superstar-in-the-making are all well and good, but let's not forget this simple fact: The Audacity of Hope is a very fine book.

Well-conceived and cohesive, The Audacity of Hope is a book of ideas, ideas that are reasoned, pragmatic, decisive, and evaluative. It is structured into nine themed chapters. And, in each of them —"Republicans and Democrats," "Values, Our Constitution," "Politics," "Opportunity," "Faith," "Race," "The World Beyond Our Borders," "Family" — Obama suggests in "broad strokes" the course we should follow in order to change our nation's hostile political partisanship and enhance our lives as citizens. He offers his own judgment, based on his "experience as a senator and lawyer, husband and father, Christian and skeptic, of the ways we can ground our politics in the notion of a common good."

Reforming our defective health-care system is our "most pressing task," and Obama presents thoughts on how to amend its inefficiency. He puts forward strategies to free people from poverty, which include expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, "tackling the nexus of unemployment and crime in the inner city," reducing teen pregnancy rates, and controlling the ever-increasing cost of higher education. He believes in leveling the "playing field between organized labor and employers" to "help workers gain higher wages and better benefits." He encourages fundamental changes in our current U.S. foreign policy, which — as the Senator expresses — lacks guiding principles, coherence, and multilateralism.

One of Obama's chief concerns is the nation's dependency on fuel from the Middle East and the lack of any real initiative to develop alternative fuel sources, renewable energy, and increased fuel-efficiency standards. As it stands, U.S. automakers maintain that they are hamstrung in their efforts to design hybrid vehicles because of fierce competition and the enormous retiree health-care expenses they pay out. During his first year in the Senate, Obama proposed legislation that he named "Health Care for Hybrids." It's a plan that brokers a deal with automakers: In exchange for federal financial assistance in meeting the health-care costs of their retired workers, automakers would reinvest these savings into developing more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Family is also an important point of discussion. As the husband of Michelle, the Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, and the father of two girls — Malia, age 8 and Sasha, age 5 — Obama understands what it's like to be a "juggler family," the term his policy director created to describe the struggles working parents experience trying to raise their children, maintain their careers, manage their households, and preserve their relationships. Obama admits readily that he and Michelle are financially able to offset some of these pressures (although Michelle lives in Chicago with the children, and is the primary parent four days out the week.) For working parents who aren't as fortunate, he recommends changing the Family and Medical Leave Act to provide paid parental leave and making high-quality day care more affordable by expanding the federal and state tax credits and offering sliding-scale subsidies to families in need.

Obama writes candidly throughout his book and conveys an attitude of humility. He declares: "[M]y treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete." A common sense approach to problem-solving is Obama's rallying cry — and he is well aware that such sensibility is atypical and breeds suspicion in today's political environment.

"I recognize the risks in talking this way . . . . In an era of globalization and dizzying technological change, cutthroat politics and unremitting culture wars, we don't even seem to possess a shared language with which to discuss our ideals, much less the tools to arrive at some rough consensus about how, as a nation, we might work together to bring those ideals about . . . . In such a climate, any assertion of shared ideals and common values might seem hopelessly naïve, if not downright dangerous — an attempt to gloss over serious differences in policy and performance or, worse, a means of muffling the complaints of those who feel ill served by our current institutional arrangements. My argument, however, is that we have no choice."

Yet, given the presence of an all-too-cynical electorate, the "sheer predictability of our current political debate," the demonization of those with opposing views, and government policies driven by ideological absolutism, the questions must be asked: Is there any room in our present-day political system for an elected official to exhibit a kind of political pragmatism that stems from, and owes its very mention to, the cogitative prudence of President Abraham Lincoln? Will political pundits and we, as voters, interpret "values-speak" as pie-in-the-sky liberalism, or can we trust that it will unlock today's "either/or thinking," which stagnates productive and imaginative governance? Can Obama, or anyone in public office, "avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to please, the fear of loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within each of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments?"

The answers can be found somewhere in the enduring American spirit, that tendency to believe in a "relentless optimism in the face of hardship," to be audacious enough to hope.

Demonstrated in the pages of The Audacity of Hope — the title derives from a sermon preached by Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. — is discernment and unfeigned goodwill. Some passages drip syrupy-sweet, but they are saved from being mawkish by Obama's keen writing. The Audacity of Hope is heartening. And even if we remain disenchanted with our politicians, Obama's book renews the belief that our system of government can find its way back to "promoting opportunity and prosperity for all Americans."

What You Didn't Read in "A Conversation With Bob Cousy"

In December 2008, I published "A Conversation With Bob Cousy" on Hoops Addict. Here are portions of my interview with "Mr. Basketball" that did not appear in the original article.

Amy O'Loughlin: In your book, Basketball Is My Life (1957), you tell the story of the State Department good will tour of Europe that you and Red Auerbach took in May 1957. You talk about meeting your older half-sister, Blanche, from your father's first marriage, who lived in Nice. You discovered "where some of [your] athletic ability came from" when you learned that she played on France's national women's championship basketball team. That must have been quite a surprising thing to learn.
Bob Cousy: She was a national cyclist. For the Resistance she ran the underground during [World War II]. She managed a hotel in Nice. She had a physiotherapy degree. She was an amazing lady and she had great drive . . . . And, yes. Her athletic ability was something. Neither my mother nor my father were athletic in any way, so I have no idea where our talent came from.

O'Loughlin: Did you know this before you met her?
Cousy: I don't remember when I became aware of it, but I think it was during that period. As I said earlier, [our family] had a dysfunctional situation. I had [intended] to meet her in Rome during one of my trips, but I got sick in Iraq, to the point of near death. The conditions were so bad. I lost twenty pounds in a month. It was bad stuff. I couldn’t meet her because I had to cancel the rest of the trip. I worked through Senator Kennedy's office [to bring her to this country]. She had gotten divorced and [her ex-husband] had her child. She didn’t get along at all with my mother. I told her: I'll get you over here. I'll get you set up in an apartment near [my parents], but you can't live with them. You can have communication and contact, and she understood given the situation with my mother. But then when she got here, my father one day —he was a funny little guy and he never said much at all—he went out for a loaf of bread and never came home for ten years! He went off and lived with his daughter. Don't get me wrong; I loved my mother, but she and my father [ran] a dysfunctional household. My mother was an intense, demonstrative, very competitive French lady, who hated the Germans with a passion. My father was born in Alsace-Lorraine, which at the time was German. He was completely apolitical. He couldn’t have cared less. But, when he was eighteen, he got conscripted in the first word war and fought with the Germans. A few years later, he remarries. He marries my mother, and thankfully they come here. The Second World War breaks out and we're getting all this terrible news about those "dirty Germans." And my mother's taking it out on my poor father. He was a nice, nice man. He wouldn’t say a word; he just worked and worked . . . . So, I could understand why my father would [want to leave the house]. I was determined that this would never happen [in my marriage]. My bride and I have been together for fifty-eight years and we've never had a household like that. Anyway, my sister died before my father did. She had ovarian cancer. But she took great care of him [when he fell ill]. They bought an old trailer and lived on a farm first in Riverhead, New York, and then in New Jersey. She died prematurely. I was coaching at the time [for the Cincinnati Royals] and I was in Los Angeles when I got the message. I flew back and went out to Riverhead. [My father] had had a stroke and he didn’t realize what had happened with his daughter. We took him with us to Cincinnati. My mother used to call, and I'd play cupid. He'd say, "Who was that?" I'd say to him, "That was your wife. All she did was ask about you and how you're doing." "Oh, no she didn't," he'd say. I'd tell him, "No, really. Yes, yes. She did. That's all she could talk about, and she misses you terribly." "No, she didn’t say that." And then, I'd do the same thing to my mother. I'd tell her that all my father does is talk about her and say how much he misses her. We were driving back [to Worcester]—our daughter was finishing high school in Cincinn, so my wife stayed behind—but my father was with me. I had it all arranged: we were going to stop in New York for dinner, and then continue on here. So, we stopped at the house. My father walks in. My mother was at the stove—my mother was a great cook—and my father looks over her shoulder and says: "W hat are we having for dinner?" It was the first time he saw her in ten years and the first thing he said to her since he went out for the bread! It broke me up. I thought it was a great line! Anyway, we have dinner and I'm looking at my watch because it's eight o'clock and I've still got a three-and-a-half-hour drive to make —and I look over and I see them sitting there holding hands. My father says, "Get the bags." He moves back in, and it's like a second honeymoon. That lasted about three weeks.

O'Loughlin: What do you think of Barack Obama?
Cousy: I may vote for him, even though I've been in McCain's corner for a while. Yet for two or three or four years I've been saying I know McCain doesn’t have a chance. But, in my mind, McCain's the only guy talking without a forked tongue and telling it like it is. For years, he's taken unpopular positions and disregarded the voters in terms of what might help him or not. He had gone against [President] Bush; now, he's becoming more conciliatory. I'm sure everybody is telling him that he's got to move closer to the middle. They're saying he's a flip-flop, but they're saying the same thing about Obama. That "flip-flopping" has a negative connotation. But, Geez, I think I'd want our leader to be a flip-flopper, because conditions are constantly evolving and changing. It seems to me [having flexibility] is a plus rather than a negative. Given my feelings about Civil Rights in this country . . . before I die I'd love to see a black president just as I would a female president. Men have screwed this world up for hundreds and hundreds of years. Let's give the ladies a shot at it. . . . I think I'll probably go for Obama. In terms of worldwide relations, the world would not believe that we would vote and elect a black president.

I do have to say that in my judgment we don't shine very often. But, we do shine when we're dealing with adversity or handicaps. This is what brings out the best of us, I think. I've seen it so often. The rest of the time we should be ashamed of ourselves. When people are dealing with hardships, it often makes them determined to overcome and all the good instincts—the best of what we have to offer—comes to the fore. If you're tested, you can rise above.

A Conversation With Bob Cousy

This interview was originally published on Hoops Addict on December 23, 2008.


Bob Cousy, the legendary play-making point guard for the Boston Celtics from 1950 to 1963, celebrated his eightieth birthday this year. In July, I was privileged to interview “The Houdini of the Hardwood” to commemorate this momentous milestone. I came to the interview with a fixed list of questions, and my goal was to find out what life was like for this former Celtic, who retired 45 years earlier as the highest paid player in the NBA and still holds the league’s single-game playoff record set in 1953 for the most free throws made (30) and attempted (32). We met at Cousy’s office at his home in Worcester, Mass.—a four-acre residence where he and his wife, Missie, have lived for 43 years. Within minutes of the start of our interview I knew that it would be unlike any other that I have conducted. Formality and adherence to a routinized Q&A script vanished and was replaced by Cousy’s cordiality, warmth of spirit and graciousness. Our interview quickly turned into an afternoon of effusive, candid and free-flowing storytelling, and the subjects of which we spoke etched a wide-ranging path through history and Cousy’s 80 years of life-experience.

Robert J. Cousy was born on August 9, 1928 in Manhattan, New York. Raised by his French immigrant parents Cousy’s first language was French; he spoke it exclusively until he learned English at age five. Cousy experienced the deprivation and poverty that typified The Great Depression during his childhood. Its impact remained with him throughout his life and molded an instinctive drive to be successful, which when applied to playing basketball translated into the insatiable hunger to win no matter what the cost. The Cousys lived in tenement housing in New York’s East End. In 1940, they left behind the city’s squalor and moved to a house in St. Albans in Queens, where there was trees and green grass and clean air to breathe. There was also O’Connell Park—the playground where the teenaged Cousy learned the game of basketball.

By the time Cousy finished high school his athletic skills were primed enough to play college-level basketball. In 1946, Cousy enrolled in Holy Cross College in Worcester, the oldest Catholic college in New England, but a school that had no gymnasium and no discernible basketball tradition. Within the year, however, Cousy and his teammates shifted Holy Cross’s standing in the world of collegiate sports. The Crusaders won the 1947 NCAA Championship, making Holy Cross the first school in New England to win a national basketball title. And when Cousy graduated in 1950, he was regarded as the best college basketball player in the country and recognized for his distinctive style of play: his behind-the-back dribbling; his no-look passes; his quick-footed court speed.

Even though Cousy had become a superstar college athlete and enjoyed the thrill and force of competition, pursuing a career in professional basketball was not an all-consuming aspiration. And going pro in the 1950s, for that matter, didn’t necessarily guarantee a life of fortune and fame. Professional basketball as a spectator sport suffered in popularity and appeal and lacked the national audience that college basketball enjoyed. The NBA, having formed only four years previously, appeared to be a disorganized entity with an uncertain future, and there were few successfully structured and long-lasting franchises. For Cousy, earning a living upon graduation stood as his main objective. If that meant doing something other than playing basketball, then that suited him fine.

As we know, Cousy did indeed choose to become a professional basketball player. Yet, joining the team that would soon be the most triumphant franchise in NBA history was an absolute act of fate. In the spring of 1950, Cousy received a telephone call from a sportswriter who told him that he’d been drafted by the Tri-Cities Blackhawks of Iowa—and passed over by the Boston Celtics and their new coach, Arnold “Red” Auerbach. Cousy made it clear to the Tri-Cities franchise that he had absolutely no desire to play in Iowa. He was then traded to the Chicago Stags, but maintained his stance: he had no intention of playing in Chicago, either. Before the regular season began, however, the Stags disbanded and allocated all but three of its players—Cousy being one— to other teams. The New York Knicks, the Philadelphia Warriors and the Boston Celtics were each slated to select one former Stag. As the storied legend in sports history goes, representatives from the three teams had squabbled and wrangled for hours and could not reach consensus on who was to go where. Maurice Podoloff, the first president of the NBA, tossed each player’s name into a hat. Walter Brown, owner of the Celtics, pulled Cousy’s name. In that instant and by the luck of the draw, Bob Cousy became a member of the Boston Celtics. He ended his 13-year career with the Celtics as one of the NBA’s greatest and most influential players of all time, and he is credited with revolutionizing the game of basketball.

In addition to 2008 being a significant year for the now-octogenarian “Mr. Basketball,” it was an astounding one for his former team. The Celtics had just won the NBA Finals— the franchise’s first World Championship title in 22 years—when I met with Cousy, which made the timing for our interview even more ideal. Who’d be better than the “Cooz,” a six-time world champion himself, to discuss the team’s winning strategy; Doc Rivers’s coaching techniques; and the commendable performance of “The Big Three”: Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce? I can state emphatically that listening to Bob Cousy talk openly about the Celtics and today’s game of basketball was an exceptional delight.

As one may expect, a conversation with the NBA’s MVP for the 1956-1957 season would focus on all things basketball-related. And ours did. But whether it was the topic of basketball about which we spoke or the myriad of other subjects that comprised our conversation—religion; current events; racism; his health; golf; his beloved alma mater (which erected on its campus this summer a bronze, life-sized statue of Cousy and in November lifted to the rafters his basketball jersey); being part of this year’s “rolling rally” victory parade in Boston to honor the NBA champions; his family; or politics—Cousy demonstrated that he’s far from being a one-dimensional character.

He is a thinking person, who once believed that bigotry was the biggest problem in the world and who nearly succumbed to the imprisoning demands of his celebrity and the unrelenting pressure of his role as basketball’s unanimously acclaimed individual player. He is a man who realized in the mid-1950s that he had frittered away some of his chances for self-improvement during college, and so started to read regularly and began a ritual of learning five new words from the dictionary every Monday morning and using them in sentences throughout the week. In 1956, he marketed his name to PF Flyers for the manufacture of custom-made basketball shoes—it was the first-ever affiliation between a professional basketball player and a sneaker company. (Go to www.pfflyers.com/cousy and watch inspiring videos of the Cooz at play and learn the history of Cousyy’s collaboration with PF Flyers.). He broadened his sphere in the world of professional sports and became Commissioner of the American Soccer League from 1974 to 1979. He is a contented and wise lover of life, who today is more apt to read the latest best-selling nonfiction book or watch cable television news shows than he is to watch a game of basketball until the final buzzer.

Here is “The Magician,” Bob Cousy. Enjoy him in all of his loquacious grandeur and captivating charm.

Amy O’Loughlin: Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to speak with me. You have a beautiful home here. I take it that this is your office?
Bob Cousy: Yes, we’ve been here forty-three years, and it’s worked out very well. Our two daughters [Marie and Ticia] went to school next door at Notre Dame Academy and walked through the bushes to go to school. We have about four acres of land behind us and we’re just five minutes from downtown and we’ve got the isolation and privacy we need. We’ve done well. It’s a little big now for [my wife], me and our French poodle. During the [Holy Cross] statue dedication, we had a houseful. We had eleven guests and it came in handy.

O’Loughlin: Yes, congratulations on the statue dedication. Did everything go well?
Cousy: It went very well. It’s unusual when you plan something for two years—I wasn’t involved in that part of it, but the committee was—and everything goes off pretty flawlessly. Everyone was happy. It had drizzled for three days prior, but the weather cleared up. So I told two of the priests involved that they were the two who got us through with flying colors.

O’Loughlin: The timing for this interview with you is perfect. Not only as a way to honor you and your achievements—which, I think, is a very important story—but also to learn about your involvement and sentiments regarding the Celtics’ big win. What was it like to be a part of the Duck Boat parade that wound through the streets of Boston?
Cousy: The Celtics won on a Tuesday, and I went [to the Garden] on that Thursday not knowing what to expect from the parade. Because when we’d win a championship —six times in a row—two days later we’d have a breakup dinner at the local hotel and about a dozen fans would show up. We’d all kiss and say “Good-bye” and “See ya’ in November.” And we’d all go off and play golf. This [parade] thing, as I said I had no idea what to expect, I have never seen anything like it. There had to have been a million-and-a-quarter people on a Thursday morning throughout that whole route! There were green people everywhere! They were hanging from the trees and the poles. I asked our Duck Boat driver after he took us back, “Did you work the Red Sox and the Patriots parades?’” He said that he worked both and that there were more people there that day than the other two [parades] put together. I’m sure weather had something to do with it. . . . But the point is, basketball, historically, had been in New England, at least, so far behind other sports. And in the fifties and sixties, [the Celtics] were the low men on the totem pole. Every other sport, including hockey, was way ahead of us. [Basketball] hadn’t been established in New England. So, it’s caught up. I’d say eighty percent of the people were young people, so [basketball] is capturing the younger generations.

O’Loughlin: It must have been an amazing experience for you as a former Celtic to see that kind of enthusiasm.
Cousy: Oh, yeah! It was! I told [John] Havilcek—he was on our Duck Boat—that I wasn’t going to smile for a month. We stood there for two hours waving and smiling. My shoulders started hurting. But it was very interesting to be part of it. And, as I say, I couldn’t believe the number of people. No matter how you look at it, it’s a great time to be a fan in New England.

O’Loughlin: And for the Celtics, it maybe seemed like it’d be a once-in-a-lifetime win?
Cousy: Yes. Well certainly thank goodness for [Paul] Pierce, who looked like he was going to go through a spectacular career individually, but never getting the brass ring. It was great for him, for all three of them for that matter. [Kevin] Garnett looked like he was going to be buried in Minnesota. No one would ever know anything about him.

O’Loughlin: Garnett brought such passion to their game . . . .
Cousy: Yeah, he did. And it was contagious. And [Coach Doc] Rivers did, I thought, a hell of a job of exploiting and selling them on “ubuntu,” which is just another word for sacrificing for the whole. They bought it, and they sustained it pretty much the entire season.

O’Loughlin: The one-year turnaround that was accomplished is just unbelievable. How do you think Doc Rivers was able to make such a turnaround?
Cousy: Obviously, the talent was provided for him. And as they say on a professional level all the time, if you don’t have the horses, it doesn’t get done. You could be the best manager or coach in the world, but rhetoric doesn’t do it if your talent’s not there. If you’re mediocre, you can get them to perform as well as that standard will allow, but obviously they’re never going to overcome great odds. In college, you can do that sometimes because you’re dealing with younger people. But on a pro level, it’s a lot different. I dropped Doc a note afterwards saying basically those of us who’ve been through it know that it is much easier to coach mediocre talent than it is superior talent, and even though you need the superior talent you still have to draw them together. And now especially when they’re all zillionaires, getting enough money for this life and the next one and all, you have that added challenge. You’ve got to bring twelve egos together, too. So this is where [Rivers] sold him on this village idea; and the fact that Pierce, Garnett and Allen wanted the championship so badly, they all sacrificed and made his job a little easier.

Then, the key was Ainge, I thought. Having “The Big Three” is fine. They were going to perform because they’re all outstanding talents. But he filled in a couple of empty spots that I thought is what made the difference, frankly. Pat Riley found out two years ago in Miami that even with Shaq and [Dwayne] Wade you’re not going to win [unless you lift up the other talent on the team.] And then, you let that that other talent get away and they went literally from first to last. They did the reverse of what the Celtics did. In basketball, unlike other sports as much, you need the complete participation of eight or nine or ten people, and they all have to be on the same wavelength. And Doc put it together. I, frankly, shared your skepticism. And I would say to people last fall that I didn’t think it was possible. Plus, it was compounded by the fact that they didn’t stay here to train. They went to England and their training period was cut short dramatically. So, they had less time to put everything in, but it still came together almost from day one . . . . [Doc] made believers out of them. He deserves a great deal of credit.

O’Loughlin: Controlling the personalities too is a difficult task. . . .
Cousy: Oh yeah, at the professional level it’s almost impossible. And if those guys all had a couple of rings, I don’t think it would’ve happened, frankly. I don’t think they would’ve had the sustained motivation or been ready to sacrifice the way they did. The timing—everything—was right. And now, they may do it again. I don’t know if they’ll repeat it, but at least they’ll be in the hunt for the next couple of years.

O’Loughlin: It’s been so painful to watch Celtics basketball the last couple of years. It was so obvious that Paul Pierce needed somebody. He was always out there trying to do it all on his own.
Cousy: I never knew he could play defense the way he did. He worked hard. My own belief in terms of his Hall of Fame credentials were suspect before this year. In fact, I dropped him a note and said, “Paul, if there was any question about whether or not you belong in the Hall of Fame, your work this year, especially defensively, proved all your critics wrong.” It is difficult when you’re the man, but you’re the only man and there isn’t a lot of help [on the court]. Last year and the season before were such long seasons for Pierce. It’s easy to put your tail between your legs. But this year was a piece de resistance for him. It was nice to see him—to see all three of them—get their due.

O’Loughlin: Do you know the players on a personal level?
Cousy: I used to, Amy. Up until five years ago I was [part of the broadcasting team that called the games] and we were doing fifty games and lots of on-the-road games, so we used to travel on the plane with the players. So, you got to know them reasonably well. We wouldn’t go out and have beer with them after the game or anything like that, but some of those plane rides can be pretty long. So, you’d interact with them and see how they’d interact with their contemporaries. I had a much better idea of them then than I do now. But I do hear from [Jeffrey] Twiss, our PR guy, and a few others who deal with the players all the time and what they tell me is that there are no badasses at all on the team. We used to say the same thing about our teams in the fifties and sixties. Even if we drafted a badass, the situation was so positive: the key guys were all on the same wavelength and wanting to do it the right way that those [types of] guys would never get a chance to influence or penetrate the atmosphere.

There’s been some talk about the three kids the Celtics just drafted. One kid, I guess, has got some negative history. But some people are saying that none of that will get [publicized] here, especially coming into the team the way it is now. The team leaders have been established. Garnett seems to be for real. His passion has been infectious. Pierce is a pretty passionate player, though not quite as demonstrative as Garnett. And Allen is Mr. Cool, but he’s got his moments, too. They are all on the same wavelength emotionally and defensively. That’s what won it for them . . . . People were asking me before the final round started who I thought was favored. Obviously Los Angeles, I said. They’ve got the best player in the league and they scored whatever it was by the numbers. But, I hadn’t seen them play all year long and after the first game I did a flip-flop and said: oh, hell, this’ll be over in five games or six because LA couldn’t play any damn defense. I wrote to my friend, Billy Sharman, who’s still their honorary president, and said, “Billy, that bunch of turkeys you had couldn’t have guarded you and me. What the devil happened out there?” Their heart wasn’t in it, and the Celtics wanted it so badly. That combination is how you end up with a forty point victory, which is so unusual at a championship level and when two teams are fairly evenly matched. The answer is that emotionally the Celtics were sky-high and the Lakers came out flat.

O’Loughlin: How does it feel when you are at a game? Do you look at the court and say to yourself, “I would have played that pass this way . . . ?” Or, “I would have taken the ball to weak side just then . . . . ” Do you find yourself thinking of plays?
Cousy: I’m not a “yesterday” person at all, Amy. I’m a “today/tomorrow” person. I don’t dwell a lot, maybe every now and then. But this year, especially, I got lured back to the past for obvious reasons. Those of us who played in those years can relate to what a great feeling it is for these kids. You’re king of the hill. You can walk into places and get instantly noticed. Basketball is the number two sport in the world, with soccer being the only sport ahead of it. More kids play basketball than any other sport in this country. Someone told me that the NBA Finals were televised in one hundred and seventy-seven countries in the world. Basketball is huge now from the standpoint of participation. Spectator-wise in this country football and baseball are still ahead, but basketball has made such strides in the last twenty to twenty-five years. And with the [Larry] Bird years, that’s when it turned in Boston.

For the first time, really, I can say that [I was affected by the Celtics' win]. We called the games for the Bird years. We were part of that, and it was nice. But I didn’t have the same passion for it that I did this year. This year, I got very emotional. I don’t go into the games anymore. I’m the Howard Hughes of the sports world. I avoid large crowds of people . . . . Any games that start after my bedtime, I don’t go to. My wife and I watched most of the games from the living room couch. My wife, I think, thought I was going into early senility because I’d be jumping up and throwing things at the television set and screaming. I haven’t done that since, I don’t know, since I played, I guess. I got much more emotionally attached to the outcome. Everything was in place this year . . . so it was easy for this old-timer to get attached to it.

And as far as thinking about play-making when I’m watching, if I’m [broadcasting] the games and the team is running transition or something, I have a habit of going ahead of the play in my mind’s eye, trying to will the point guard to dip his left shoulder to move the defender to go to his right. I used to do it almost instinctively. I don’t do that much anymore . . . . And now, they don’t run transition like we used to. The coaches are more conservative, and there’s more walk-the-ball-up-the-floor. We did some running this year though, and [Rajon] Rondo did a reasonably good job—although he’s insecure about his shooting, which affects his play-making. But, he did come to the floor in the last game. He shot and scored twenty points or whatever it was. He has all the talents to run an up-tempo game; it’s Doc who’d I’d like to talk into speeding it up more. It’d be easy for them, because they have young players and the players who have the speed and athleticism to run more transition. [Tommy] Heinsohn and I have been flailing away at that one for years and nobody listens to us . . . . . Unless you’ve got four or five big Frankenstein monsters and no point guard, obviously you’re not going to run transition. But, that’s unusual. Every college team in the country has a guard—he may not be Steve Nash, but they call him a point guard and he’s the best passer they have. The fun part of the game for basketball players is running up and down the floor, especially offensively. And so, if a kid likes to do something, it becomes more effective. It’s a component that I think ought to be part of every agenda at whatever level of play and certainly in the pros. But I bet there are three, four, maybe five teams out of thirty that rely on any kind of transitional game even the ones with good point guards . . . . My skills were all geared toward the transitional game. If I had to play for a walk-the-ball-up-the-floor coach, we wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d have been bored to death. You would never have heard of me.

O’Loughlin: Do you watch college basketball?
Cousy: No. I guess as you get older a lot of your attitudes and preferences change. Part of that is television viewing. Believe it or not, my wife and I have become addicted to Fox News Channel. And I do a lot of reading, but I’m behind by five books. I did Woodward’s [Bush at War], I did Bernstein’s [A Woman in Charge] . . . I’m doing Obama [The Audacity of Hope] now . . . . And good old Bernie Goldberg. I just got through Wimps. . . [Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve]. My interest has sheered toward current events and politics, which Fox answers for me. We’ll sometimes start at four in the afternoon with Cavuto and go to Gibson and Brit Hume. Then we go over to MSNBC for Matthews because Chris Matthews went to Holy Cross. I like Chris. I’ve met him a few times. I know he’s on the other side. Fox leans to the right. Chris leans to the left. I’ll be honest with you, though; I don’t watch a lot [of college basketball]. After The Final Four, we give out the [Bob Cousy] Point Guard Award. We’ve done it for the last five years or so. The Award is given to the best point guard in the country. I’m kind of ashamed because I have to do some homework before I give it out to find out who these kids are, because I don’t see them during the year . . . . Even watching an NBA game—of course with the exception of this year—I’m not really into as opposed to watching Fox. But I was mesmerized watching the tennis finals at Wimbledon. I have an interest in golf, so I watch the Masters, the Open, and so forth . . . . ”

O’Loughlin: Do you golf everyday?
Cousy: In the winter I do, if I can get out of bed and get on my bike and ride to the first tee and make it safe and sound. In the summer, I play two to three times a week. But I generally hit balls. I’ve reached a point where I prefer hitting balls than playing for four hours. I’ve found that it’s a good way to keep the blood flowing and get a little physical activity in. I play Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. And if someone calls and really twists my arm, I may do it Sunday. Two to three days a week is enough to get the juices flowing. I’m just coming off of a three-day tournament from this weekend, so I’m satiated. I enjoy golf, but I’ve had a terrible swing for years and years and years and I’d never go out and hit practice balls. I jump out of the car, head to the first tee, and start hitting away. So for the last twenty-two years—ever since we got to Florida (The Cousys reside in Palm Beach County during the winter)—the course there has a pretty nice practice area and I’ve gotten into the habit of practicing and targeting balls every day. Although, I noticed this year that the degree of urgency was a little less than it has been, so I’d take a day off here and there.

I had a hip replaced in 2000. It didn’t affect golf, but I had to give up tennis even after all the rehab . . . and even with the “exies” (exercises) that I’ve been doing for thirty years. I hurt my back playing racket ball about twenty-five, thirty years ago, and I got someone to put me on [an exercise] regimen. Every morning I lay right there (Cousy points to the floor of his plush-carpeted foyer), or if I’m in a hotel—it’s almost like brushing your teeth—I’ll get down on the floor and do some “exies” . It takes me twenty minutes to work and warm the blood down to the quads and hamstrings, and then I do the full range. During the rehab for the hip it progresses through stages, and [when you're stable enough] they put you on the machines in the gym. I continued that three times a week. I’d go to Holy Cross where they have a nice health club. I’d go in the mornings at seven-thirty, when there wasn’t a boy in sight. But, there were always nine or ten coeds. The girls would be working off an all-nighter and the boys would be sacked out. The girls would look at me and say “What’s that old fart doing busting in at seven-thirty?” But, this year I stopped doing that, not for any reason but your body tells you what it can do and what it can’t. I’m still with the “exies” every morning on the floor, but I’ve stopped going to Holy Cross. In Florida, we used to go to the Bally’s nearby and my wife would join me. This year she’d say, “‘Do you want to go to Bally’s?” I’d just be back from golf and [having already done] the “exies” and say, ‘Well, I’m just going to lie down for half an hour, and then we’ll go.” Well, we’d never end up making it. That was the end of Bally’s.

For tennis, the lateral movement is okay, but the up-and-down is not. And the barracudas that I play with, if they know I can’t go for the drop shots or the lobs, that’s all they’re going to hit to me. So, I packed it in. In the next life, I’ll come back as an athlete or something. Knowing my competitive nature, my fires are banked, but they’re not out completely. They’re smoldering, and every now and then a small spark will flash up. But, if I went out and played and they kept hitting drop shots, I’d be trying to get to them and I’d fall and hurt myself and wouldn’t be able to play golf. Then, they might as well put me in a pine box. I decided the better part of valor was to forget tennis for this life.

O’Loughlin: Were you pleased with the way the statue at Holy Cross came out?
Cousy: Yes, very much. The twelve committee members worked very hard for two years to put this thing together. Usually when you plan for something [years in advance] nothing turns out right. But, my goodness, there wasn’t a thing out of place, and everything went very well. The flowers even bloomed. My Seattle daughter did a hell of a job with her two or three minutes [of speaking]. It was well received, and the pigeons were all happy with their depository program.

O’Loughlin: I read in the newspaper that you stated in your remarks that one day you’d like to see your statue flanked on one side by an African-American athlete and on the other by a female athlete.
Cousy: The power behind the throne on the committee was Father John Brooks, who was the former president of Holy Cross and who is my hero. He and I have remained close, close friends over the years. He was the one responsible for breaking the color line at Holy Cross. He hand-picked three or four kids from Philadelphia to come to Holy Cross. He was so concerned and anxious to do it effectively, so that everyone was satisfied that academically and character-wise these students would be the first [who'd succeed at college]. He borrowed my wife’s station wagon himself—the President of the school!—and drove all the way to Philadelphia, put them in the car and drove them all the way back [to Worcester]. Incidentally after those forerunners, one student from Holy Cross ended up being Clarence Thomas. And when Anita Hill was doing her thing, I remember I was so proud because at the hearings there were at least three black lawyer-types or businessmen-types all Holy Cross graduates, who testified on Clarence’s behalf. They were magnificent, and it was such great PR for the school. And then, a few years later about seventy-six, [Father Brooks] broke the gender barrier and brought in girls.

[There was a time when] I almost gave up my religion, literally. They made a big fuss out of the fact that I roomed with one of the first African-American players in the league, Chuck Cooper. He was a basketball player and his color was academic. He was high-class and intelligent. We shared similar things: we both liked soft jazz and we used to go to clubs and listen to Earl Garner if he was in town and we’d hang out until two in the morning. The story’s been told about when [Cooper] couldn’t stay in a hotel in Charlotte. We went to Auerbach and said, “Arnold, let’s not make a fuss. After the game we’ll bring our bags and we’ll take the train and sleep the way through.” We got to the platform. Now, I grew up in New York and Chuck went to school in Pittsburgh, and we were fairly sophisticated and we knew there were a lot of bad people out there. We ran into colored and white signs at the platform, which meant we couldn’t even be together. It was the first time I ever saw such a thing. It was so embarrassing. I was embarrassed to be white, and I didn’t know what to say [to Chuck]. And it was at that time that I found out that there were segregated churches in the South. I wasn’t aware. I must’ve been naïve in that regard, because in my mind I could not relate that to religion at all. And in fact, I said in my remarks—and maybe it stemmed from that [realization]—that if a belief system or a philosophy or a religion doesn’t have as its basic tenet the equality of the human, then anything else they tell me to believe becomes irrelevant. So, as I said, I could’ve [given up my religion]. I came very close to it. Maybe it’s not necessarily the church, but it’s certainly bigoted priests. For me, at twenty-three-years-old or how ever old I was, to try to rationalize segregated churches while they preached to me since I reached the age of reason that God loves all of his creation didn’t make any sense. But, getting back to Father Brooks, he was the man who made Holy Cross gender-blind, color-blind and ethnically diversified, which is the way any Catholic Jesuit or non-Jesuit school should be . . . . And that was the point I was making in my remarks, that inclusion is what the Jesuits should reflect: a minority; a female; and a male.

O’Loughlin: Do you see your grandchildren often?
Cousy: No, that’s the problem. My Seattle daughter is the one who produced the two grandkids. My Florida daughter didn’t have any children. The kids and the grandkids used to come home for three weeks in the summer, so we’d see them for that period. And we’d go out [to Seattle] occasionally for special events. And now, one granddaughter has graduated from Santa Clara. They’re both good kids and they’re both geniuses. My granddaughter was summa cum laude. She was National Honor Society, the whole nine yards. We tell our granddaughters that obviously they took after their grandparents. But, unfortunately, we don’t see them as much of them as we’d like.

O’Loughlin: I have here in my notes a section called “Fate, Luck and Destiny.” It pertains to the incredibly well-timed series of circumstances that shaped you into becoming one of the best basketball players in the NBA. At age 12, you and your family moved to St. Albans. You met Morty Arkin, Director of O’Connell Park, where you and your boyhood friends played. He introduced you to the game of basketball, opened your eyes to a whole new world of competition and became your earliest basketball mentor. In your 1957 book, Basketball Is My Life, you tell the story of when you were a boy and you fell out of a tree and broke your right arm. You were in a cast for weeks, so you started to play handball with your left arm. You write: “And although no one told me, somehow or other I got the idea that I had something good going for myself. I made up my mind to play with both hands after my right was O.K. again so I wouldn’t lose the use of my left.” You instinctively developed dexterity as a two-handed ball handler when you broke your arm—an indelible skill that would come to characterize your game. You came to the Celtics in 1950 by virtue of Walter Brown picking your name out of a hat.

How do you interpret these coincidences? Do you believe it was luck, destiny, fate or perhaps an amalgamation of all three? Do you think you would have risen to the level of your career choice if one of these factors had not occurred? And if you had never discovered the game of basketball, what do think you might have done?
Cousy: In my case, my career started with a lot of God-given athletic talent. I was fabricated overseas. I was born six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. It was 1928, in the heart of the Depression. We went back to the farm my father left—thank God!—which was in a little farming community in northeastern France. This was in the mid-sixties, and I had my two daughters with me—they were eleven and twelve—and I was doing public relations work in France for Gillette, which was one of the few companies doing sports marketing in those days. They hired me, and we went out and did twenty-two cities in twenty-four days and did the whole periphery. We kicked it off with a press conference in Paris. L’Equipe, the big sporting newspaper over there, found out about the human interest story. They said when you get here, we’ll detour and we’ll visit [where your father is from].

I’d had no communication with the family. Family dysfunction breakdown and all that. My father’s three brothers were still mad at my father for leaving the family farm, for leaving them to go where the streets were paved with gold. So we get there, and I found the parish priest and asked him where the Cousy farm was located. We walked up to the door— and of course they don’t expect us or anything—it was [this little house] with earthen floors. No electricity. They had to go out and milk the goats and bring us bread, cheese, and milk.

At that point, I’d been told over and over for twenty years, “Hey Cooz, ole boy, your timing sucks. You were born twenty years too soon.” Because I was the highest paid player in the league when I quit, making thirty-five thousand during my last year. I used to go out [and make speeches] and when I spoke, I’d say: “The highest paid player fifteen years ago was Michael . . . ? What’s his name? Michael . . . ?” And someone from the crowd would yell out: “Jordan!” And I’d say: “Yeah! That’s the sucker! He made thirty-five million during his last season!” So now I’m sitting there [at my father's family farm] and I’m saying to myself: “Oh, boy! If I were born twenty years sooner, I’d be here on the farm picking potatoes all day!”

And so, my uncles are saying to me: “Comment va le bon vivant?” referring to my father, which means “How’s the playboy?” My poor father. From the minute he got here in 1928, he had two jobs, worked eighteen hours a day, died penniless. He was certainly no playboy. It took him twelve years to save five hundred bucks to get us out of that terrible ghetto on the East River and get us out where there was fresh air and hoops. And so, that was the first stroke of pure good luck. I was thirteen when I started to play basketball, which was kind of old even then. Now, it’s ancient—kids start playing basketball these days when they jump out of the womb. Then, seventeen years later I ended up at Holy Cross. Most of my contemporaries never went to college. We didn’t have the wherewithal to even think about college. So, I’d say first, it was the God-given athletic talent, then somehow finding my way to Holy Cross. There was no recruiting done [in those days]. I had a letter from the coach that said essentially “Hey Kid, we need a hotshot. If you want a scholarship, fill out this form.” Which I did. So, I wandered off to school. Ten of us—most of them GIs—wandered in the same way, and we win the damn NCAA! In fairness, the NCAA was not the big deal that it is today, but still. The funny thing about going to Holy Cross was that they had given up their basketball program—it was so low on the totem pole. They had given it up during the war years and resurrected it in forty-five/forty-six— one year before —and now in the second year, we win the NCAA! It was incredible! Again, good fortune. And then, we did well in New England tournaments and went to the NCAA twice more.

After Holy Cross, [my co-captain, Frank Oftring, and I] were going to go into business because we had some notoriety. We’d gone to see some bank presidents and asked them how do we capitalize [on our notoriety]. They said, “Where it’s at is gas stations! Open up a string of gas stations!” Well, we opened up an auto driving school along with [the gas station]. The gas station went down the tubes quickly, but the auto driving school took off like gangbusters. By the middle of the first summer we had three cars going around-the-clock. We were doing the teaching ourselves and we’d hired a couple of other guys, and that’s probably what would have been my career: Cousy and Oftring. We would have had a bunch of auto driving schools until I learned that I’d been drafted by some place called Tri-Cities.

The NBA wasn’t a big deal, and I really didn’t aspire to play on a professional level. I’d never seen an NBA game while I was at school. I had just gotten married and I wasn’t about to move to a tri-city and play for the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. I said, “Geez, I was a pretty good student. I must have slept in class or something. What the hell is a tri-city?” They put that in the headlines of the Tri-City Bugle, which didn’t endear me to the good folk of Tri-Cities. The owner [Ben Kerner] was in Buffalo, so I went up [to meet him] and he said, “What’s it going to take [to get you to sign with the team]?” I said, “Ten thousand, Mr. Kerner.” “Oh God, Cooz, I can’t!” he cried for half an hour. So, I said, “What can you pay me?” He said, “Six thousand.” Well, hell I knew I could do better than that. We had a road tour around New England with all the college players and we’d all made well over ten thousand and I knew I could have done that for another ten years. And The Globetrotters series had just begun, so when [Kerner] said six thousand and I’d have to pick up and move to someplace called Tri-Cities, a place I never heard of, I shook his hand and said, “Thank you very much.” I went home and continued teaching ladies to drive. I guess [Kerner] decided I was serious because he traded me to Chicago [to play for the Stags]. I said it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to Chicago, either. The team disbanded. They dispersed the players, and there were three of us left: [Max] Zaslofsky; [Andy] Phillip and I. New York [Knicks] picked first and they got Max Zaslofsky and they were ecstatic. Philadelphia [Warriors] got Phillip, who became a Hall of Fame point guard. And the only thing left in the damn hat other than the lining was moi. [Celtics owner] Walter Brown called me the next morning and said, “Bob, we picked you out of a hat. Come on in. We’ll talk.” I got there and he said, “What do you need?” And I said to him, “Mr. Brown, I needed ten thousand.” He said, “Would you settle for nine?” I said, “Yeah, not a big deal.” And the rest is history.

Six years later we win the first championship, and I’m around for six of them. Yes, luck had everything to do with [my success]. And I said that in my remarks [at Holy Cross], too. You’ve heard so many jocks over the years get up and say they’re the luckiest jock in the world. I’d put my history up against all of them put together. I can’t imagine things working out any better. So yeah, you need a lot of luck. You need a lot of God-given talent, but you have to be in the right situation, too. I think moving out to St. Albans, which at the time was a hotbed of basketball—that’s all the kids wanted to do—getting to Holy Cross; coming to Boston with Auerbach the same year he joined the Celtics: it was a whole series of fortunate events.

But in fairness also to the idea of continuing success, you also have to exploit opportunities. A lot of people sit on their ass and just never activate things. I’ve never been aggressive about it, but I’ve always been aware of exploiting situations that develop if they’re available to me. So, to be successful is a combination of all of those things.

O’Loughlin: When you first picked up basketball when you were young, did you know, or could you tell, instinctively that it would become such a huge part of your life?
Cousy: Not really, no. But I do remember the first “organized” game I played was for the Long Island Press League. The Long Island Lindens, we were. We won the game, and I was the high scorer with fourteen points. I wasn’t expected to do much—I wasn’t a good shooter—but in terms of a competitive nature, most good athletes will respond to the moment, even if you are only fourteen-years-old and playing in your first organized game. Good athletes will respond to the high pressure situations better than those with mediocre talent, because when they’re faced with that kind of stress, they generally underachieve. But the good athletes need that kind of motivating factor. Just the fact that you’re all nerved up and you think you’re going to fall apart, but if you’ve got the God-given skills, you don’t. You respond to the moment, and then you overachieve. And after that, the sky is the limit. You’ve got to be practical about it and realistic about it. I was five-ten, five-eleven; and until my senior year in high school I landed All-City as a scorer, I never thought of myself as being a scorer. I thought of myself as more of a passer, so I kind of surprised myself. By nature I’m not a cocky person at all, but I’m also not insecure about the things I know I’m no good at and the things I am. I’ve never been plagued by thinking [I was] better—and that’s good—than [I really am]. Because that always instills the fear factor in whatever it is you want to do in terms of sports. When you’re a little frightened going in to it, you’re always going to overachieve as apposed to thinking, “Well, all I’ve got to do is show up.” Because that’s when you get burned. I suppose if you’re Wilt Chamberlain and you’re seven feet, if you’re towering over everybody, it’s hard to be insecure about your game. But, as a five-ten or eleven guard in high school—in college I eventually got close to six-two—it was the same situation for me as it was for Magic Johnson, who was six-nine as a point guard, and even Steve Nash at six-four—these guys [take into account their size and know their performance level]. So, being a little taller and stronger, I guess, you could fall into that trap of becoming overconfident about your game. But that never happened with us. Me and my contemporaries, we were just out there working at it as hard as we could.

During my first six years with the Celtics, we did pretty much as well as we could, which is the criteria for achievement in anything. If you work hard and do the best you can and get to be as good as you possibly can be, that’s what it’s all about. Auerbach had a lot to do with that [philosophy]. His first six years with the Celtics we all knew we were never going to win anything, but every day of every season we probably always overachieved. That’s how you do it, though, in professional sports. You’ve got to have the talent. You can overachieve one day, but you won’t continually do it if the skills aren’t there. And then, you’ve got to have the temperament to complement those skills. For me, I’m assuming my ghetto experience honed whatever killer instinct I needed.

O’Loughlin: It is certainly challenging to face that pressure of having to get geared up physically and mentally for that next game, night after night. That pressure to perform. What would you do to manage that demand?
Cousy: Yes, it’s difficult, but it’s a motivating factor, too. The last two or three years [before I retired] when I knew that every father had his kids at the game saying, “There’s the best basketball player in the world! Watch and see what he does!” Once I started to recognize that and also to recognize that my skills were starting to fade, that’s the kind of pressure that no longer becomes a motivating factor. I was lucky, however, because I really dodged that bullet, because by then I was surrounded by these five or six Hall of Famers. My getting-on in years—I was thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, whatever it was when I quit—were kind of hidden behind them. I could do my play-making skills and I could fake it in playoff competition when the pressure does become so magnified. In my mind I’d do it as if I was going to do it myself. I’d pass off to one of the five teammates that I was playing with: Sam Jones; [Bill] Russell; [Tommy] Heinsohn; [Frank] Ramsay; [Bill] Sharman. I was surrounded. I couldn’t have done it if I’d been like Paul Pierce had been— all by myself out there—knowing my skills were eroding and having reached certain pinnacles and knowing the parents were saying, “There was the greatest player in the world!” The fear of falling off the pedestal gets so big and it gets you to wonder. But, up until that point I knew what I could do. I knew my limitations.

I think [how you handle the pressure] though depends on your makeup. I listen to [the commentators] and they’re always saying, “Boy, is that guy a competitor!” Well cripes, they’re all competitors! You don’t reach that level [of professional play] unless you’re competitive! But, there are degrees of preparedness. I’ve said it often and I still believe it today, today’s jock will work every bit as hard as the Celtics did this year to get to the top of the hill the first time—because they’re just as competitive as we were. But, I don’t think any of them today will work as hard to stay on top of the hill as we did forty years ago. Because what they have today works against them. We were making two or three times what the average [professional] was making at the time. Now they’re making so many millions of dollars that it’s difficult to maintain this killer instinct. When you’ve got everything you want, you’ve got limos waiting to take you anywhere, you’re behind armed guards, you’ve got [surveillance] monitoring your property—it’s a distraction.

I’ve said many times that they’ll never be dynasties again. As I’ve said I don’t go out in public much anymore and I didn’t used to boast. I’m not a yesterday person, but whenever I’m interviewed I assert the past and say that what I’m most proud of is having played a role in the greatest team sport dynasty that this country will ever produce. I understand that records are made to be broken, but that one [winning eleven NBA championships in thirteen years] will stand forever because of the circumstances. When Michael’s team a few years ago won three in a row, I’d be getting these phone calls: “Is this the best team that ever was?” I’d say, “Wait a minute! We’re eleven out of thirteen! They won three in a row. Wait a few years, and then ask me the question!” Well, you know, people always obviously remember the present better than do anything else. But, that’s something that will never be done again. Eleven out of thirteen years in a team sport at a time when it was tougher to do. The players today are bigger, stronger, more athletic—I’m not saying they’re not. But, there wasn’t the number of teams then that there are now, and the talent level was much more concentrated. That was the time when the old cliché about the last place team beating the first place team used to happen frequently. There wasn’t that much difference [between the teams]. So, it was a lot harder to dominate the way those units did. To win eleven out of thirteen years, that will never be replicated. I don’t care what the conditions are—unless, of course, they revert back and start paying these guys a normal wage and year-to-year contracts. That’ll never happen. So, I’m very proud to have played a role in that, because that’s going to be forever. It’s never going to be surpassed.

O’Loughlin: You visited the White House several times during your career. You met Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Reagan. What was that like?
Cousy: Yes, we were invited six times. Eisenhower was the first. He was kicking off his physical fitness program, and I represented professional basketball. In fact, Russell was there and he represented college basketball. What struck me about the Eisenhower visit was that everything was done on a minute-to-minute schedule. There were about fifteen or eighteen of us and we waited in the green room. An aide came in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, would you please form a semi-circle. The President will be down in exactly a minute-and-a-half.” And in exactly a minute-and-a-half, Eisenhower showed up. Of course, with his military background he would anyway. I was impressed because he went around and shook everyone’s hand and had appropriate remarks, so you knew he’d been briefed a little bit. “Bob, how’s your basketball?” or whatever it was. He had something appropriate to say. That was impressive as opposed to [President] Johnson. I went back twice for Johnson. In those days, The Big Brother of the Year Award was presented at the White House. Johnson was the recipient the year before, and I was the recipient that year (1965). You could tell [Johnson] didn’t know why he was there. I had both of my daughters with me—they were nine and ten— and he was nice to them. Everyone else he was terribly rude to; and the press, he’d be screaming at all of them. The press jumped in as we entered the Oval Office. They were jockeying for position and falling on each other, and he got pissed off and screamed at them again. I went back the next year because Billy Graham won [the award], and they always asked the former recipient to come back [to present the award to that year's winner]. We sat for twenty minutes, maybe a half hour waiting for [Johnson] to arrive. As far as punctuality goes, I remember Eisenhower was the [best at it]. John F. Kennedy was like one of the boys. It ended up being fun to be with him and, of course, he had his Massachusetts connections. It was cute—the story that came out of that visit. [Tom] Satch Sanders was our rookie that year and Satch was so nerved-up. As the President was saying good-bye to all of us on his way out, he said to Satch, “Tom, thank you for joining us this morning. Congratulations.” And Satch said, “Yeah. Take it easy, baby.” And the President looked up, and it was just hilarious! That phrase was just coming into use and that’s all Satch could think of. Sports Illustrated did a story on it. It was real cute. My wife and I went back for Reagan when we had a small exhibit—I don’t know if it’s even still there—in the Smithsonian. They did some updating of ornamentation or whatever, but the focal point was anyone who’d been involved with the Smithsonian was invited [to the White House]. Reagan spoke to the group, but I didn’t have any personal contact with him. We were invited by Nixon, but that was during the [Vietnam] War years, when I coached the United States against the big, bad Russians. In the spring of nineteen seventy-three, the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) brought the Russian (Olympic) team back to make some money. They asked me to coach, and we played six games and won four out of the six. We played in Baltimore. Nixon invited us to the White House for acknowledgment. All of my guys were anti-Nixon and they politely declined. So, we didn’t go . . . . But, the other five visits were great. It was interesting to get a glimpse of how the political world runs. It’s a nice experience to look back on.

O’Loughlin: In 2000, you sold a lot of your memorabilia. Were there any specific pieces that you held on to?
Cousy: We used to have it all in the cellar. [When we decided to sell, the auction company] was here for three days inventorying everything. I said to them a few times, “Guys, this is junk. You’re not going to get . . . .” “Oh, no, no!” they said. “This is your junk. You’ll be amazed [at how much things will go for!"] My wife used to sneak down in the middle of the inventorying and she’d grab little pieces when they weren’t looking. So, she’s saved a few and we’ve accumulated a few more since then. There’s enough left. The only time I used to go down to the cellar was when a friend or someone would bring by his twelve-year-old son and I’d say, “Okay, come on down. Let’s look at the old days.”

O’Loughlin: So, you had no real attachment to your collectibles?
Cousy: Well, I don’t know. I probably would have kept it. We split the proceeds and gave them to our daughters. [Selling] came at a timely fashion, especially for my Seattle daughter because the grandkids were just starting college. To me, it was done for a good cause. As I’ve said, I’m not a yesterday person. I can’t say I had an emotional attachment to the stuff. It was going to sit there. The jacket they gave the fifty best players ever—the jacket was just going to hang in the closet. Some of the laminated plaques when I retired—there were about eighteen of them—my wife snuck only one away. Eighteen of them we had on the wall and they depicted my career of thirteen years with the Celtics. They were well-preserved and they were nice. If I brought someone downstairs, I used to like to point out the different years. [Parting with the memorabilia] wasn’t traumatic. I wouldn’t have sold it just for the sake of selling it . . . . [The reasons for selling] far outweigh, in my mind, hanging on to old relics. How much do you need of the old days to focus your attention?

O’Loughlin: Do you have a favorite piece?
Cousy: Well, I don’t know. The [Bob Cousy] Point Guard trophy is nice and [giving out the Award] has worked out very well. Hopefully, it’ll last for a few more years. By the way, they used the same sculpture for the Holy Cross statue. That’s a seven-foot five replica of this trophy.

O’Loughlin: That piece has an interesting–looking sketch of you. It reads: “Presented to Bob Cousy. Player of the Decade.”
Cousy: Oh, yes. That’s from the Philadelphia Sportswriters. Player of the decade [from the fifties]. Fifty-seven was, I guess, my piece de resistance. We not only won our first championship, but I won the MVP award. An MVP is a big man award, and I was the first point guard to win it—now there’s been about five others and Steve Nash has won it twice. He almost won it a third time.

O’Loughlin: I was beyond privileged this March when I had the chance to meet Steve Nash when Phoenix played the Celtics. A dear friend who works for the NBA gave me tickets to the game. I brought to the game a friend who works in marketing for the Boston Breakers, the women’s professional soccer team. She had some promotional materials to give to Steve Nash, who is heavily investing in women’s professional soccer here in the U.S., as well as in Canada. After the game, we were introduced to him. He was kind and so friendly.
Cousy: He’s a good guy. I dropped him a note when he won the first [MVP award], and he wrote me a nice note back.

O’Loughlin: You’ve been interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands of times. Is there a question that has never been asked of you that you’ve always wished had been? Or a topic that you would have liked to discuss, but never had the opportunity to do so?
Cousy: Oh, I don’t know, Amy. There’s a kid in the pro shop [at my golf course], one of the assistant pros. He’s a sports fan. He’s always asking, “Mr. Cousy, of all the people you’ve ever met, who are the most . . . ?” You’ve caught me by surprise with the question, and I haven’t been asked that question. I just don’t have a good answer. I haven’t had time to think about it. But, I said to the kid that probably the private audience with the Pope was a very significant moment for me. That one’s up there [on the list]. Arthur Ashe has always been my kind of hero, because I thought he handled the race situation with dignity and class; he helped his cause because he wasn’t inflammatory. He wasn’t Al Sharpton. He wasn’t my good buddy Bill Russell or even my friend Jesse Jackson, who’s come here to Worcester once or twice to help us out. But, the way they handled it is fine, too. If you’re under that kind of pressure, well . . . we all react differently. Sometimes when I do something I’m ashamed of and when the pressure’s on, I revert back to my roots. Instead of shaking the guy’s hand after losing, you want to kick him in the groin. Those things stay with you. But, with an issue like [race], I’m sure Arthur Ashe in the privacy of his own thoughts used to say, “Those white SOBs!” and I don’t blame him. I can empathize with Russell. He was king of the hill after I left. When I got into Worcester Country Club I found out years later that the secret committee [only asked one thing] when my name went through. It was: “If we let him in, do you think we’re going to have Russell up here?” When you’re sitting on top of the sports world in Boston and you can’t play at the local country club and people are breaking into your house, how would any of us react? I don’t know. But, what I’m saying—from a distance—Arthur Ashe’s approach I respected because he didn’t turn off the moderates, he handled it with dignity, he didn’t become an Uncle Tom. He fought the good fight. I think he did his cause immeasurable good. It’s easy to tell the other guy to turn the other cheek when it’s not your cheek. It takes a lot of willpower and discipline to do what Arthur Ashe did—and, as a result, I think the benefits are far greater. Therefore, I have great respect for Arthur Ashe. And I mentioned [Arthur Ashe] to the kid, too. And, as I’ve said, meeting the Pope was “pretty cool,” as the kids say today.

O’Loughlin: I think we’ve come to the end of our time together. Is there anything you’d like to say in closing?
Cousy: Well, as far as the Celtics win, it’s capped not only my year, but it’s made me ready to go off to the big golf course in the sky now a happy camper.

Cooking With a Right Jolly Old Elf: Santa's Recipes from the North Pole

Santa's North Pole Cookbook: Classic Christmas Recipes from Saint Nicholas Himself by Jeff Guinn

Hardcover, 272 pages

Publisher: Tarcher

Price: $19.95

Published: 2007

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in December 2007.

Santa’s North Pole Cookbook: Classic Christmas Recipes from Saint Nicholas Himself is Jeff Guinn’s newest addition to The Christmas Chronicles, his as-told-to-by-Santa-Claus series of holiday books, which includes The Autobiography of Santa Claus (1994); How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas (2005); and The Great Santa Search (2006).

In Santa’s North Pole Cookbook, Santa handpicks more than 60 holiday recipes from 32 countries that he’s visited during his extensive Christmastime gift-giving travels. Santa also introduces us to Lars, the official North Pole chef who lives with and cooks for Santa; Layla, better known as Mrs. Claus; Santa’s helpers; and Santa’s friends —namely Attila the Hun, Leonardo da Vinci, and Theodore Roosevelt. (Pick up the charming The Autobiography of Santa Claus and learn how Santa befriends these — and other — legends of history and meets and marries Layla.) Lars offers tips on the preparation of Santa’s festive breakfast, side-dish, main-course, dessert, and drink recipes and adds some of his own dishes that he’s perfected while at the North Pole.

“With this cookbook,” Santa says, “I’m so pleased to welcome you into our well-fed company . . . . Every recipe will add tasty enhancement to your seasonal revelry. You’ll find some . . . gloriously simple, perfect for children who want to help prepare holiday snacks. A few will require considerable preparation, but they will reward you for your effort. I promise that all are delectable, whether they are consumed as part of a family meal or potluck dishes at a jolly Christmas party . . . . Essentially, I’m inviting you and your loved ones to pull your chairs right up to Santa’s own dining room table.”

On December 6, “Nicholas Day,” Santa begins his gift-giving in Hungary and certain parts of South Africa. Hungarian children refer to Santa as Mikulás Bácsi, or Uncle Nicholas, and leave their shoes out overnight to be filled with candy. And some South African children expect Santa’s presents on Nicholas Day, too.

On Christmas Eve in Hungary, children await Jésuka, or Baby Jesus, who brings them their gifts. A Christmas morning breakfast of palacsinta (pancakes) made with baker’s cheese is prepared, and later in the day only holiday beigli (poppy seed or walnut pastries) will do for dessert. In the regions of South Africa where Christmas is celebrated on December 25, Santa is called Goosaleh and families leave Christmas karringmelkbeskuit (buttermilk biscotti) for Santa to enjoy after he’s filled their stockings. Because it is summer in South Africa, holiday specialties are on the lighter side. But, Santa says, that doesn’t mean they’re any less delicious. As proof, Santa offers baked mealies (corn kernels) and tomatoes, a dish that complements pork or beef and can be an appetizing main course for vegetarians.

In Ethiopia, Russia, and Egypt holiday observances occur on January 7. Ethiopia is one of the oldest Christian nations (dating back to 330 A.D.) and is where some of the “most venerable” Christmas, or Ganna, as it is called, traditions can be found. Ethiopians fast for 40 days before Ganna. When Ganna arrives, Santa states, “everyone is ready to feast!” A zesty chicken stew called Doro Wat, made with a spicy butter named niter kebbeh (recipe included) and hard-boiled eggs, is “as traditional a holiday main course in Ethiopia as roast turkey is in America.” (Regarding turkey: Lars includes his Christmas Rosemary Turkey recipe, which may “shock turkey traditionalists” with its use of garlic. “All I can say is, try it! You and your Christmas dinner guests will be delightfully surprised,” Lars assures.)

Russians anticipate the holiday visit of Ded Moroz, or Grandfather Frost, and kissel, an easily prepared traditional cranberry dish that goes well with goose or turkey, is served. In Egypt, kakh, sweet cookies filled with walnuts, honey or date spread, are customary holiday desserts.

On January 6 when Epiphany — the day that honors the legend of the Three Kings who brought gifts to Baby Jesus — is celebrated in Peru, families prepare Rosca de Reyes (Kings’ Ring). It’s a rolled, sweet bread made with mixed fruit, almonds, cinnamon, and sugar that’s “just right for having on hand as a Christmas-themed treat for guests,” Lars says.

In Sweden, a holiday gnome named Jultomten delivers gifts to the children, and Christmas morning is just the start of holiday celebration. More than 1,000 years ago, King Canute decreed that Christmas feasting should last one month, so Swedish holidays end on January 13. Serving Julbord, a variety of simple-to-prepare appetizers, is a long-established custom.

Christmas traditions are strong in Cuba despite the government’s imposed strictures. Lechón Asada (pork roast) prepared with a mojo marinade of garlic, cumin, white vinegar, and red cooking wine and accompanied by Moros y Cristanos (black beans and rice), the recipe for which dates back to the 1500s, are a favored holiday meal.

“When you prepare and serve this dish,” Lars imparts, “you’re creating a holiday link that goes back at least five centuries.” (This reviewer, in the company of friends, tested this Cuban offering. “Fantástico" was uttered frequently from those seated at the dinner table.)

The diversity of these international cuisines continues with Trinidad and Tobago’s Black Christmas Fruitcake, which tastes all-the-better when you soak your fruit mixture in brandy and rum for at least a month; Australia’s Flaming Ginger Prawns appetizer; Korea’s Bulgogi (Fire Meat), a barbecue beef dish that pleases the taste buds of “Santa Grandfather”; Jamaica’s Coat of Arms (spicy peas), made with coconut milk and hot red pepper sauce; Finland’s Julglögg (Christmas mulled wine), a drink with a “considerable wallop”; Ivory Coast’s Yuletide Aloco (plantain chips); Ghana’s Christmas Fufu (mashed yams), which completes any poultry dish; the Philippines’ “exquisitely delicious” Lumpia (spring rolls); and Spain’s Hot Chocolate.

There are plenty of recipes in “Santa’s Cookbook” for those who prefer time-honored holiday fare. From Lars’s North Pole kitchen come Fluffy Scrambled Eggs with Rosemary; Traditional Cranberry Ambrosia; and Fruitcake Cookies, which “prove that fruitcake can be enjoyed as a delectable snack that won’t . . . ruin digestion.” And recipes from the U.S.A. include Ben Franklin’s Festive Blueberry Muffins; Theodore Roosevelt’s Pan-Fried Christmas Potatoes; and White House Christmas “Moose.”

Santa is a master gourmand, and this collection of recipes reflects a definite love of food. “At the North Pole,” he says, “we certainly find that gastronomic globetrotting ensures the very merriest of Christmas seasons!”

Owen Parry's Christmas Tales: Heartwarming, Beautifully Wrought, Poignant

Strike the Harp!: American Christmas Stories by Owen Parry
Hardcover, 179 pages
Publisher: William Morrow
Price: $14.95
Published: 2004

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in December 2004.
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Our Simple Gifts: Civil War Christmas Tales by Owen Parry
Hardcover, 149 pages
Publisher: William Morrow
Price: $14.95
Published: 2002

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in December 2003.
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Honoring Studs Terkel by Revisiting "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?"

Studs Terkel

(1926-2008)

The author-radio host-actor-activist and Chicago symbol

has died.

"My epitaph? My epitaph will be: 'Curiosity did not kill

this cat,' " Studs Terkel once said.

Chicago Tribune, November 2008


This book review was originally published in

North County Family & Health in May 2002.

Click article to view larger.

Esther Forbes: The Writing Life

Esther Forbes
(1891-1967)

This biographical sketch was originally published

in Central Mass Magazine in November 2007.

Click on article to view larger image.

Esther Forbes Bibliography:

O Genteel Lady!, 1926

A Mirror for Witches in Which Is Reflected the Life, Machinations, and Death of Famous Doll Bilby, Who, With a More than Feminine Perversity, Preferred a Demon to a Mortal Lover, 1928

Miss Marvel, 1935
Paradise, 1937
The General's Lady, 1938
Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, 1942
Johnny Tremain: A Novel for Young and Old, 1943
America's Paul Revere, 1946
The Boston Book (with Arthur Griffin), 1947
Anne Douglas Sedgwick: An Interview, 1947
The Running of the Tide, 1948
Rainbow on the Road, 1954

Kirsten Holmstedt Examines Women in War Time in "Band of Sisters"

Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq by Kirsten Holmstedt
Hardcover, 327 pages
Publisher: Stackpole Books
Price: $27.95
Published: 2007

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in November 2007.


For more than 200 years, women have served America in times of war. During the Revolutionary War, Deborah Samson of Plympton, Mass., disguised herself as Robert Shurtliff and enlisted in the Continental Army. (Samson was proclaimed the Official Heroine of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1983.) Irish-born Jennie Hodgers donned male clothing, renamed herself Albert Cashier,and joined the Civil War's Union Army. In World War I, 30,000 women served as nurses and support personnel in the Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. In 1942, during World War II, the Women's Army Corps (WAC) was established. By 1944, the first WACs arrived in the Pacific Theater of Operations, and in July WACs landed on the beach at Normandy. At this time, there were over 100,000 women in uniform, and the WACs were the first women other than nurses to serve with the Army. Also, civilian women flew military aircraft under the direction of the United States Army Air Forces.

From 1964 to 1973 during the Vietnam War, approximately 265,000 military women aided the U.S., and an estimated 11,000 women performed combat missions alongside their male counterparts. More than 40,000 servicewomen participated in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and one out of five women in uniform moved with their units into combat zones.

The Gulf War became a defining moment for women in the U.S. military because it raised the long-neglected, controversial topic of women's assignment to combat duty. Women gained permanent status in the armed services in 1948, and the Department of Defense's military code has always banned them from engaging in direct combat. However, fundamental changes in the nature of present-day warfare and the technology used to wage war have blurred the front lines and the definition of combat. More and more women started performing duties that put them in the enemy's firing line. Their contributions to the nation's worldwide military conflicts could not be ignored. Subsequently, in 1993, the U.S. Congress repealed the exclusion of women from combat aviation and assignment to naval combatant ships, and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin ordered all armed services to open a selection of military positions to women, many of which involved combat. Since 1993, women have been eligible for roughly 260,000 positions, signifying that 80 percent of military jobs and 90 percent of the armed services' career fields can now be filled by the highest qualified person—man or woman.

A decade later, the American-led war in Iraq began—and continues. Nearly 26,000 of the 130,000 troops serving in Iraq are women. They are the direct recipients of the military's expanded opportunities, and their effectiveness is under scrutiny. Band of Sisters by Kirsten Holmstedt is "the first attempt to take a close look at how the experiment of women in combat is playing out . . . in Iraq."

On March 20, 2003, at the Al Jabar Air Base in Kuwait, 28-year-old Marine Captain Amy McGrath, a weapons' system operator on an F/A-18 fighter jet, suited up and walked to her jet. She was heading into combat with her squadron, the Green Knights. It was the start of the Iraq War, and McGrath would be flying in the first round of missions.

Holmstedt writes, "How [McGrath] and other women in the U.S. military performed in jets and helicopters, on aircraft carriers, in convoys and in surgical wards, and when they came face-to-face with enemy prisoners of war, would validate or refute one of the most radical, controversial, and public experiments in the annals of U.S. military history. The eyes of the enemy were on [McGrath] as she took off. So were the eyes of her countrymen. Would she be successful?"

Yes, McGrath was. Her squadron continued uninterrupted air combat for three months. In 24 days, McGrath flew 37 missions, dropping untold numbers of bombs to destroy the enemy and enemy targets in support of troops on the ground.

McGrath is one of 12 extraordinary women whose combat stories comprise Band of Sisters. The women's aptitude, courage, preparedness, and dedication to their duties and fellow soldiers exemplify what a highly trained and sophisticated military force ought to be. And as McGrath declares: " 'This is our job . . . . We're there, and we're there to stay.' "

In mid-2004, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Polly Montgomery took command of the 41st Airlift Squadron becoming the first female commander of a combat squadron. For 15 years, Montgomery—41, a wife, and mother of three—flew C-141s. Her new assignment required that she learn to fly C-130s, a Vietnam-era, 155,000-pound plane that transports cargo and troops. On one of Montgomery's first combat flights, she and her crew were targeted by service-to-air missiles—and the C-130E model she piloted wasn't outfitted with weapons. Montgomery had to make a split-second decision to maneuver the plane in a "completely unnatural move"—that is, to turn in to the missile to protect the engine. She succeeded, winning the respect of the 200 airmen under her command.

Marine Corps Captain Vernice Armour, 29, is the first African-American female pilot in Marine Corps history as well as the first black female combat pilot in the history of the Department of Defense. She flies Cobra attack helicopters, which carry Hellfire missiles, rockets, and 20mm guns and rounds. In an attack on the fedayeen, an Iraqi paramilitary group, Armour and her co-pilot fired off most of their ordnance to get out of range of the fedayeen's anti-aircraft artillery. The pilots made another pass and "Amour could still see the enemy on the ground so she fired flechette rockets . . . . Armour could see the fedayeen [sic] falling to the ground but couldn't tell if they were going down because she had shot them or because they were taking cover. She believes that she killed them and that's okay with her. Each time she destroyed her targets—military tank, ammunition site, or insurgent—she felt a great sense of accomplishment. In this situation, in addition to defending herself she was protecting the ground troops who otherwise would have walked into an ambush. Taking out the enemy is what she's trained to do. She wasn't thinking on a personal or emotional level. In the heat of the moment, she was using the tactics she learned in training and applying muscle memory to target, flip switches, and pull triggers."

These amazing feats of skill and bravery continue in the experiences of Navy Lieutenant Estella Salinas, 37, nurse division officer for Bravo Surgical Company; Army Sergeant Angela Jarboe, 28, whose leg was shattered when her convoy was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED); Chrissy DeCaprio, a 21-year-old Marine gunner with 2nd Military Police Battalion, who operates a 50-caliber automatic machine gun—a 61½ " weapon, which is as long as DeCaprio is tall; Navy Aviation Boatswain’s Mate Handler (ABMH) Marcia Lillie, 23, who was assigned to the active flight deck of the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman, one of the world's most hazardous working environments; Marine Lance Corporals Carrie Blais, 28, and Priscilla Kispetik, 23, who provided combat service support to infantry Marines and was engaged in a firefight with insurgents on the streets of Haditha; Army Captain Robin Brown, 28, pilot of a Kiowa Warrior helicopter; Army Specialist Rachelle Spors, 23, a National Guard medic from Nebraska; and Marine Gunnery Sergeant Yolanda Mayo, 35, reservist and public affairs chief who's served in the Marine Corps for 18 years and is a veteran of the Persian Gulf War.

Despite a few missteps in Holmstedt's prose Band of Sisters captures the sights, sounds and successes of women in combat in the Iraq War. To read this book is to show reverence to these women's achievements and to acknowledge their duty to country.

Sacred Duty: How the Military Cares for Its Fallen

Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen by Michael Sledge
Hardcover, 376 pages
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Price: $21.95
Published: 2005

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in November 2006

We can truly say that the whole circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. … I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come, than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.

— King George V, Flanders, Belgium, 1922

“I believe I was chosen to write this book,” notes Michael Sledge in the Introduction to his impressive Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen. “I woke in the middle of the night and found myself sitting bolt upright in bed. I had not been dreaming . . . yet before me in my mind’s eye was a blazing vision of a single, solitary soldier lying dead in a foxhole . . . . [After this vision] a desire and curiosity were planted in me that I knew would change me forever. The next day I began searching for an answer to the question, what happens to members of the Armed Forces when they die?”

Using official government documents, interviews with military personnel and families who have lost loved ones during America’s wars and conflicts, never-before-published photographs, and his own insights (which connect the book to current events), Sledge unravels the intricate details of the U.S. military’s efforts to retrieve, name, and lay to rest its fallen servicemen and women. The historical record of recovering soldiers’ remains dates back to the 1800s during the Seminole Indian Wars of Florida. And though these centuries-old recovery efforts have undergone numerous name and policy changes, the military has always considered the treating of soldier dead as a “sacred duty.”

With keen reverence, Sledge reveals the “extraordinary lengths to which we go to care for [our deceased military] — and why we do so.” You get a picture of what it was like for World War II soldiers to identify remains, bury them in temporary graves, and exhume and prepare them for repatriation or reburial in permanent cemeteries when the United States was losing approximately 500 service personnel on an average daily basis. You meet military personnel whose duty was to retrieve soldier dead during combat, “one of the most heroic and dangerous [recovery operations] . . . that poses some of the most challenging questions about American policies, both written and unwritten, because soldiers are often wounded and killed bringing back the dead.” You learn about the psychological toll that is exacted on the living when handling the bone fragments, pieces of flesh, and decayed skeletons of the dead. You see how the misidentification, misplacement, and mishandling of remains — as well as delays in their return to bereaved families — has affected the government’s credibility.

Skepticism regarding the government’s ability to properly identify and process remains is not a new phenomenon. “Burial irregularities,” which include the opening of caskets to find the wrong soldier’s remains inside or no remains at all or, during exhumations, the finding of a body buried face down, not in a coffin, or multiple bodies in a single grave, have been documented since World War I. And, dating as far back as the Civil War, family members have often made the disconcerting discovery that the remains they have received are not those of their loved ones. Similarly, the military’s occasional withholding of information about how a soldier has died, where the remains — if any — are located, and how the process of return of remains functions has fostered distrust.

It was the Korean War, Sledge states, that marked the beginning of public disillusionment with both the country’s inducements for war and the government’s attempts to account for its military personnel. The Vietnam War came thereafter, and its delinquency created a “suspicious” and “jaded” American public.

Public sentiment for war has not altered significantly since the 1950s. However, the current Iraq War has generated a great swell of detractors who have voiced misgivings about the war’s purpose, timing, and strategy. And in considering the Iraq War’s soldier dead, it is believed that there are no “unaccounted-for” personnel. Sledge wisely adds a cautionary note to that declaration, writing that the “situation could change as the ‘regime change’ has not brought about the expected peace and U.S. soldiers are still dying.”

The Iraq War has once again called into question the government’s integrity and authenticity as a result of its many blunders and false claims. One area in which Sledge identifies a particular disingenuousness is the continued media ban on photographing or filming the return of soldier remains “anywhere along the chain of custody” — a policy instituted during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, America’s first major war since Vietnam.

During major combat in the Iraq War, Sledge, as a member of the press, was embedded with the Army’s 54th Mortuary Affairs Company in Baghdad. Watching this group of military personnel perform their duty was Sledge’s “introduction to the ‘real world’ of repatriating our Soldier Dead from the Iraq War.” He reflects on our nation’s motives for maintaining the ban on media coverage:

I may have been one of the few, if not the only media person, allowed to witness the movement of remains, but even this access was tightly controlled. . . . From military’s members’ comments and from the well-known aversion to losing American lives in wars considered by many to be of questionable value, I believe the 1991 ban on press access to the return of the dead is grounded in the desire to minimize the public outcry over body bags. The military will vehemently tell you that the media strictures are to "protect the privacy of the families," but I can’t help believing that they are also trying to carry out our national agenda with the use of military force while de-emphasizing the persistent corollary that the use of force results in the loss of life.

Sledge contends that the most striking feature about the debate on keeping the dead from view is that “no one is asking the right questions. Why would a photograph of a flag-draped casket being unloaded from an airplane be considered a breach of family privacy? If we are not allowed to see the physical manifestations of the human cost of battle, then how do we, as a nation, note the sacrifices of those killed and the families who are left to grieve?”

“It is fortunate,” Sledge avows, “that our dead are brought home soon after death instead of months and years later as in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. . . . Yet the prompt return of remains means that there is no occasion to receive, en masse, our Soldier Dead in a fitting ceremony, and this diminishes the collective recognition of the lives lost in military duty. . . . Now, with the loss of media coverage, what little national recognition there was is reduced ever further. While some have tried to provide a visual image of the dead — the display of 500 pairs of empty Army boots in Chicago’s Federal Building Plaza in January 2004 is [a] good example — we still lack a poignant reminder of the national loss of American lives.”

We must “form and preserve an image that reminds citizens collectively that someone else paid the price for their well-being,” he says.

Soldier Dead is substantial and meticulously researched. It honors the contributions of our fallen soldiers and further sanctifies their “supreme sacrifice.” For Sledge, Soldier Dead is an intensely personal journey of discovery; for readers, it is edifying and powerful. This timely, yet enduring book deserves a place in the annals of American history.

MLK Jr.'s "Montgomery Story" Fascinating 50 Years Later

Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hardcover, 230 pages
Publisher: Harper & Row
Published: 1958

This boook review was originally published in MotherTown in January 2004.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was 29-years-old when he wrote Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. Yet, the story King chronicles—the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.; his philosophy of nonviolence; and his ideas on race relations—took place three years earlier when he was only 26, two years into his marriage and father to a baby girl, Yolanda. It is extraordinary that a man so young could possess such an acute understanding of society's ills, know in which direction to move to cure them, and be brave enough to act as spokesman for a social movement that would forever alter one small city in the segregated South and affect the world at large.

Stride Toward Freedom, King's first book, begins in 1954, when King was at a crossroads in his career. Having just completed his doctoral studies at Boston University, King was torn between the desire to teach and the inclination to preach. With job offers in both fields—most in the North; one in the South—he and his wife, Coretta, whom King had met in Boston, pondered over their decision. Leaving the North, with its less visceral racism, to return to their Deep South homeland, with its Jim Crow laws, segregation, and intolerance, was a difficult matter to decide.

Growing up in Atlanta, King knew how the shackles of segregation strangled. "The first time that I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood," King writes. "[S]eparation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect . . . . Can I return to a society that condones a system I have abhorred since childhood?" A system that "forever stares the segregated in the face, saying: 'You are less than . . .' 'You are not equal to . . .' "

Feeling morally obligated to return, desirous to do something about segregation and sensing that something remarkable was emerging in the South, the Kings moved to Montgomery, in 1954, where Rev. King took on the pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

At that time, Montgomery, the "Cradle of the Confederacy," was thought to be an easygoing, even peaceful town. But, beneath that atmosphere, a "slow fire of discontent" burned. Montgomery's black citizens were fed up with segregation's indignities, inequities, and humiliations. And riding Montgomery's buses was one aspect of segregated living that was taking its toll. Many white drivers spewed ugly insults at their black passengers. Many made riders pay at the front of the bus, then forced them to board at the rear. The policy of white-section and black-section seating fostered long-standing humiliation among black passengers, so that when Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white man, this act of will ignited the black community and emboldened them with a "new spirit of courage."

King recounts the process of protest. He reveals how the decision to boycott city buses was made; how the movement was organized, carried out, and how it gathered momentum; and how the newly formed resistance group, the Montgomery Improvement Association, of which King was president, countered Montgomery's ever-increasing opposition—behavioral, legal, and lethal. It is fascinating reading.

The Montgomery bus boycott would not have succeeded without the influence of religion. But, King saw that religion alone could not maintain people's allegiance. The church must be concerned not only about men's souls, but also about the social and economic conditions that scar that soul. If the protest was to be a success and garner real social change for the people of Montgomery, a shared philosophy was needed. King combined the teachings of Christian faith with the principles of social justice, particularly the Christian doctrine of love and Mahatma Gandhi's concept of nonviolence resistance. These became the boycott's guiding force.

Reading Stride Toward Freedom from a vantage point of 50 years, you are looking back at a significant period in American history. Given that time span, you might think that King's concepts and convictions would be out-of-date or applicable only to a 1950s society. That assumption would be wrong. King's writings have kept their deep and vital importance throughout the decades. They are as precise and full of foresight today as they were in 1958.

Take King's view on violence: "if the American Negro and other victims of oppression succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle for freedom, future generations will be the recipients of a desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos." Or, King's remarks on hatred: "Along the way, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives."

Stride Toward Freedom is written with wisdom and intellect of awesome proportion. Amazement overtakes you as you read about the heroism, serenity, and genius of a people dedicated to the cause of freedom. You also get glimpses of the unmatched revolutionary Martin Luther King Jr., will become soon after 1958.

A disquieting sadness emerges while reading King's story. Progressing through King's most meaningful chapters—"Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," "The Violence of Desperate Men," and "Where Do We Go From Here?"—you are reminded that many of society's injustices, which King pinpointed as constraints on freedom and this nation's glory, are still with us. And that the man who had the power to "[inject] new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization" is not.

Pictures Both Disturbing and Profound: The Holocausts of Rwanda and Sudan

Africa: The Holocausts of Rwanda and Sudan Photographs and Text by Lucian Niemeyer
Hardcover, 170 pages
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Price: $50.00

Published: 2006

This book review was originally published in MotherTown in September 2007.

Africa: The Holocausts of Rwanda and Sudan presents a visual documentation of the survivors of four human catastrophes that have occurred in Africa in the last 20 years. Published in “coffee table book” format, it includes more than 140 superb photographs shot by Lucian Niemeyer (Maine: A Portrait, 2006; New Mexico: Images of a Land and Its People, 2004). Niemeyer used Leica SLR 5 and 7 cameras with lenses ranging from 35mm to 400mm; a neutral film, Agfachrome 100; no flash or filters. His photographs are awash in color, light and shadow. Each captures the essence of existence in these volatile regions of Africa, and portrays the dignity and world-weariness of those who have endured starvation, disease, slavery, rape, annihilation, displacement, the deaths of loved ones, and the decimation of their way of life.

“Rwandan Refugees: A Story of Life"
Niemeyer’s journey begins in September 1994 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). A doctor invited Niemeyer to Central Africa to document the Rwandan refugee crisis, hopeful that the images and the story would prompt humanitarian aid. They visit three camps populated by refugees who fled Rwanda with nothing but the clothes on their backs following the Hutu-led genocide of more than 500,000 Tutsis in April.

Each camp holds over 200,000 people. In Mugunga Camp, situated at the base of an active volcano, ten people squeeze in for every ten-by-fifteen foot area. Their shelters are straw huts covered in plastic tarpaulins provided by the United Nations and are built on the hardened lava flow, which releases carbon dioxide gas into the air when it rains. There’s scant food or water. Cholera, typhoid, malaria, dysentery, and blackwater fever plague the refugees.

In Kibumba Camp, the influx of 200,000 refugees disrupts the sustainment of the original 29,000 tribespeople who live there. Within days of the refugees’ arrival corn fields are flattened and water systems polluted. “Unless some NGO [nongovernmental organization] or government decides to help these 29,000 civilians, they too will become statistics of the Rwandan exodus,” Niemeyer avows. “Innocent for sure . . . blameless, yes, the injustice of a terrible, dark feud continues to devastate and haunt humans throughout the area and the world. For here is no justice, no order, and little future. . . .”

PHOTOGRAPHS: “Old Woman with Staff—Mugunga”
A woman squats on the ground. She holds a wooden staff and is dressed colorfully, wearing a red-and-white striped shirt and red plaid skirt. A bright green and yellow cloth wraps around her and is tied at the shoulder. She appears exhausted. A look of everlasting sadness furrows her face.

“Kibumba Refugee Camp of More Than 200,000—Zaire”
A panorama of thousands of straw huts covered with blue and green tarpaulins. The shot depicts a segment of the camp, yet conveys that the view is infinite.

"The Sudan Slave Story"
In December 2000, Christian Solidarity International (CSI), a human rights organization based in Switzerland (http://www.csi-int.org/), invites Niemeyer to Sudan to record the purchase and redemption of Sudanese slaves.

Sudan is located between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East—the area where the “oldest known history of man has been revealed” and where “genocide is practiced with a malice that knows no human boundaries.”

In 1992, the Sudan government (GOS) in the Arab Muslim north, in its efforts to force a national religion, declared a holy jihad against the African Christian south. Millions have died; hundreds of thousands have been displaced. And, amidst this bloodbath, an extensive slave trade persists. Villages are raided, the men are slain and the women and children are abducted and sold into slavery. “Most civilized nations have turned a deaf ear to this great holocaust. . . . It is one of the shames of the world that considers itself civilized.”

Redemption of slaves is facilitated by sympathetic Arab “intermediaries” who oppose enslavement. CSI redeem 4,119 people during Niemeyer’s trip. The exchange is $35 per person—the price of a goat. The redeemed share appalling stories of rape and unrelenting abuse. “Africa is so beautiful, yet it can be so cruel. . . . The emotions of the last few days were the most extreme that I have ever had. They have etched and seared me forever,” Niemeyer declares.

PHOTOGRAPHS: “A Close-Up of a Young Slave Girl Waiting to Be Redeemed—Wedweil”
A young girl’s penetrating stare dominates the photo. Her yellow-tinged eyes express fury and profound sorrow.

“Woman with Scars and Burnt Fingers Acquired While Resisting Rape—Sudan”
A woman holds up her hand. Her index and middle fingers are shrunken and bowed. Her plaid blouse is unbuttoned. On her chest are thick, raised scars that look like coiled rope. She tilts her head and gazes distantly.

"Sudan Oil Field Genocide"
In 2001, Niemeyer returns to Sudan at the request of The Persecution Project based in Warrenton, Virginia, a foundation that collects and disseminates information about worldwide Christian persecution, with particular focus on Africa (http://www.persecutionproject.org/).

Oil was discovered in the south in the 1970s. By 1999, it was flowing through a 900-mile long pipeline to the north, and then distributed worldwide. The finances generated from the oil trade enable the GOS to wage war and “kill its own with impunity.” The GOS establishes a “scorched earth policy” around the oil fields to maintain the uninterrupted flow of oil and has become a “fundamentally radical state similar to the theocracy of Afghanistan’s former Taliban government.”

During Niemeyer’s visit the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) march to the front line of battle and face GOS troops. SPLA’s munitions consist of rocket-propelled grenade launchers, AK-47s and sticks carried by barefoot boys, while GOS armament includes tanks and gunships. When the battle ends, 100 SPLA forces are wounded and 50 die; GOS fatalities number 500.

PHOTOGRAPHS: “Two SPLA Girl Soldiers—Ngop”
Two teen-aged girls stand in front of a wall of thatched straw. Each wears a blue tank-top athletic shirt and has an AK-47 rifle slung around her neck. Their faces are stern. Their look is resolute.

“Seven-Foot Tall Nuer Chief in Ngop”
This chief wears a navy blue velvet hat tied under the chin. He’s decorated in a red-and-white striped sash. His face is scarified in concentric half-circles according to Nuer tribal tradition. He squints in the sun.

“Nuba Mountains, Sudan”
Niemeyer travels to the Nuba Mountains in February 2004, to learn about the 5,000 years of brutality perpetrated against the Nuba people. Since 2002, Niemeyer attests, there exists a relative stability in the region. In 2005, the GOS and SPLA sign a peace accord, and the Nuba’s hopes for “peace and self-rule” are materializing—slowly.

PHOTOGRAPH: “A Nuba Woman—Lowere”
An older woman sits in profile under a tree. She is draped in a green and white-flowered wrap. Sun shines on her face. She appears dispirited. Her eyes are downcast.

This book’s reality is difficult to tolerate. It’s nearly impossible to reconcile the fact that these atrocities happen despite worldwide awareness. And the question—What about the present-day genocide in Darfur?—makes one mourn and seethe.

"Journey from the Land of No": A Story of Rebellion and Optimism in 1970s Revolutionary Iran

Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran by Roya Hakakian
Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Crown
Price: $23.00
Published: 2004


A portion of this book review was originally published in The Bolton Commoner in February 2008.








In December 1977, President Jimmy Carter toasted Mohammad Reza Shah Pavlavi, the king of Iran, at a royal dinner in Tehran with the following words: “Iran, because of the leadership of the shah, is an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world.”

. . . But there was another Iran, too, where individual and civil liberties lagged behind health and economic growth, where political parties, except that of the shah, were banned, and where freedom of expression did not exist. The shah wanted to restore the glory of ancient Persia to twentieth-century Iran, yet contrary to his grand aspiration, his intelligence service . . . hounded writers, intellectuals, and political activists and tortured them in prisons.

. . . In the global cold war, the majority of secular, educated Iranians stood against imperialism, which the United States represented for them. And in 1978, when those intellectuals heard the fiery rhetoric of a clergyman, they answered his call. . . . Ayatollah Khomeini [exiled in France] vowed to stand against the tyranny of monarchy and of the United States, which he denounced for undermining Iran’s sovereignty. He had emphasized over and over that he had no desire to be in power, only to return to his native city of Qom and continue his religious studies.

When he finally arrived in Iran on February 1, 1979 . . . , he returned as a leader who had unified the Left and the Right, and galvanized millions to demand an end to 2,500 years of monarchy. Those millions also included hundreds of young Jews. Against the wishes of their elders, many Jewish students joined the revolution, hoping to recast their identities as secular Iranians, who would then assimilate seamlessly into the fabric of the utopia that the revolution promised.

On February 12, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini’s sacred status rose to that of an “imam,” only a step away from the prophet’s in the Shiite tradition. . . . By April an overwhelming majority of Iranians voted for the establishment of an Islamic republic.

. . . By the end of the second year, he had broken nearly every promise he had made. Every underground group that had joined a coalition with him to overthrow the shah was banned again. The control of all civil and political facets of life fell into the hands of a group of young radicals who called themselves members of Hezbollah, Party of God.

The 100,000-member Jewish community of Iran, the second largest community of Jews in the Middle East, after Israel, fell into disarray. The new regime’s pronunciation of Israel as Iran’s greatest enemy reawakened anti-Semitic sentiments. Though in several major speeches Ayatollah Khomeini recognized the Iranian Jewish community as belonging to the people that the holy Koran viewed as legitimate “people of the book,” the social, economic, and educational opportunities of Jews were fast dwindling. They began to emigrate from Iran, a country in which their history preceded that of Muslims by several hundred years.

. . . For those who lived in Tehran, that brief period [of " unparalleled freedom”] following the revolution remains the most memorable time of their lives. History books speak of the Iranian revolution as one of the greatest revolutions . . . of the twentieth century. The revolution was that and more. For the children of that era, 1979 was not only a year but also a love affair, the most alluring love of their lives.

In time, it proved to be the cruelest, too.

This is the story of that affair.

― Roya Hakakian
"Historical Note” from Journey from the Land of No


For young Roya Hakakian, a Tehrani Jew on the cusp of adulthood, the years between 1978 and 1984 were years punctuated by rebellion. These were heady days of repudiation characterized by the militant, fanatical revolution that engulfed her native Iran, a change in political power that promised freedom yet delivered subjugation and authoritarianism. The idea and feel of revolt permeated the atmosphere in which Roya lived; so, for her, staging an uprising would not be an atypical action. However, Roya’s rebellion was not a wide-reaching demand on Iranian society and the political order. In her not-quite-a-woman/ no-longer-a-child state of being, hers was a personal, coming-of-age crusade to make sense of religious codes of honor and tradition, discrimination against females and Jews, societal chaos, and repression of intellectual thought.

In her valuable and excellent memoir Journey from the Land of No, Roya, whose name means “dream” in Persian and who was so named because her birth in 1966 had made her father’s dream come true—a baby girl to add to a threesome of boys—tells of her pre- and post-revolutionary life in Tehran.

She starts her story in 1975, when she was nine. The Hakakians— Haghnazar, her father; Helen, her mother; and Albert, Javid, and Behzad, her brothers—were members of a prominent Jewish community and lived at the idyllic-sounding residence of Three Alley of the Distinguished. Juniper trees, magnificent and tall, surrounded its courtyard; they exalted the neighborhood, gave it its distinction, and were, The Hakakians proclaimed, the reason for the alley’s grand appellation.

Roya’s father was a headmaster, poet, and “one of the city’s most persuasive speakers.” Haghnazar Hakakian commanded a regal reverence in his neighborhood. Among Jews, he received great displays of respect. The community declared that Mr. Hakakian could do no wrong, and that the presence of “the poet, the conscience of the community, and the tireless educator” was a blessing for all. Among Muslims, he was greeted as “Mr. Haji”—Haji being a Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five Pillars, or essential practices, of Islam. To these wishes of goodwill, Roya’s father would obligingly respond, “ ‘May Allah keep you safe!’ Not Khoda, Persian for God. No. Father invoked the Koranic equivalent to express his appreciation for living at a time and in a city where a Jew could mingle with others so freely that he was mistaken for a Muslim.”

Roya’s brother, Javid, instructed his little sister by reading The Little Black Fish by Samad Bihrangi to her. A classic of Persian literature, The Little Black Fish expresses criticism of the social, political, and economic structures of contemporary Iran and was deemed subversive by the shah’s secret police. Although, at age nine, Roya did not grasp the book’s implications and symbolism, Javid urged her constantly to scrutinize her thoughts: “ ‘If you do nothing else in life, remember what I’m telling you,’ “ Roya recalls Javid telling her. “ ‘Think! Think of any book as a riddle. . . . Look at every detail, and ask, Why this? Why that? Only then you’ll discover something new. Do you do that? Do you look at things like a smart girl, as the bright Roya that you are, or do you skim everything like a silly girl?’ “

“Think! was the command of our household god,” Roya relates. And, as she matured—leaving behind the “oblivious child” she believed herself to be in order to embrace critical thinking—and was witness to the revolution’s formation, The Little Black Fish and the curious circumstances surrounding Samad Bihrangi’s fate became the identifying markers that clarified for Roya Iran’s desperate need for revolution. They, along with pledges to end poverty and the promise of an open and freethinking society, were the markers of propagated truth that inspired Roya to sympathize with “Down-with-the-shah!” demonstrators and to agree that the swift executions of the shah’s associates were right and necessary. “They were beasts who had ravaged our land and caused the misery of the downtrodden,” Roya writes. “They had to be killed, for as [Ayatollah Khomeini] warned, ‘Left to their own devices, those “humanoids” would fester and infect us again.’ ”

And even when the Jewish philanthropist, Habib Elghanian, whose endowments benefited all Hebrew schools, was executed for “charges [that] sounded ancient, even biblical: ‘Friendship with the enemies of God, warring with God and His emissaries, and economic imperialism,’ ” Roya continued to be swept away by the revolution’s show of unity despite ethnicity. Revolutionaries rooted out tyrants—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—and though the “scene of [Elghanian’s] trial, the words that were exchanged, had invoked the memories of the old blood libels among the elder Jews . . . those memories did not belong to my generation. My classmates and I remained loyal to the adolescent code of conduct and dismissed our parents’ worries. Unfazed, we treated this particular corpse like all the others: one more enemy caught in his tracks.”

As part of the revolution, Iran decided to become an Islamic republic. For the Jewish community this was originally an acceptable alternative to the old regime. Yet slowly, but deliberately, Iranian Jews began to feel a squeeze on their liberties, which indicated to them a return to the days of segregation. An “ad hoc assembly” of six men visited Ayatollah Khomeini in an effort to gain a personal guarantee from him that the community would be protected. They wanted the imam to be aware of “one of the lesser-known pillars of Judaism: True Jews are ones who share in the wishes of the society in which they live. And now that Iranian society wished to establish an Islamic republic, so did every good Jew.”

Khomeini listened to the group. After an incongruous discourse on male-female courtship and copulation, he assured the men that Iranian Jews were nothing like the “godless,” “pharaohlike Zionists who run Israel” and that they would remain distinct.

Not long after the imam’s reassurance, though, it was mandated that non-Muslim business owners display signs in their windows that said “THIS STORE IS OPERATED BY A NON-MUSLIM” and designated certain school bathrooms and water fountains for use by non-Muslims.

For Roya, the takeover of her school, the Raah-e Danesh Hebrew Day School, by Mrs. Moghadam and her protégés, the “notorious Holy Cleaner-Uppers,” signified that “something irretrievable was happening.” Mrs. Moghadam slung cruel insults at Roya: “ ‘Since you’re so bright and know so much about the Jewish tradition, tell me, why do Jewish fathers take it upon themselves to deflower their daughters?’ " Roya’s fervency for the revolution started to wane as she realized that these extremists were turning assurances of freedom into chaotic restrictions, interdictions, and divisions.

Facing anti-Semitism was not a new challenge put before The Hakakians. Roya’s father experienced it during childhood. Yet, as was Haghnazar Hakakian’s humble manner, he “would never admit to having run into anti-semitism” [sic]. In his youth, Haghnazar was often derided as “Johoud,” which Roya, using the Mo’in’s Persian Dictionary, defines as a Jew or the yellow piece of cloth Jews sewed on their garments to distinguish themselves. “But, in the Hakakian lexicon,” she writes, “Johoud had only one meaning: a world, a word that Father buried before he left [his childhood village of Khonsar.]. There Johoud meant ‘dirty.’ “

Some forty years later in the Iran of the 1970s, Haghnazar Hakakian encountered this word again, though this time it did not translate into “dirty.” It was Jew, and it appeared with a swastika and a demand to get out of Iran. And this time, Haghnazar’s reaction was seismic.

“Najes” was the word Roya, her three brothers, and her parents encountered frequently, “for however far Iran had come, even by 1977, some Muslims still called Jews najes: dirty. [Every year, three weeks before Passover, we, the Hakakians, assumed our annual pose of piety. To honor the ancient Israelites’ hasty departure from Egypt . . . we fought against dirt.] This was the season to prove our cleanliness to our neighbors, though as I would soon learn, the war against impurity was without end, and uncleanness a most indefatigable enemy.”


Roya’s lesson on cleanliness came quickly, and it came from her own community. She learned that she would never be “clean” because she was female. This demeaning ostracism devastated, confused, and angered her:

[The] imminent flow [of blood] out of my body . . . had already defiled me. Defiled! What did a word so unkind have to do with me? . . . Blood, the blood that was flowing out of a sheep’s body was so holy, was unclean flowing out of mine? Why? What made one clean and the other . . . bad? Was it . . . “filthy?” Filthy? Me? I had seen a protestor, clubbed in his face, be raised upon the arms of men, his bloodied shirt instantly a talisman. I had seen the group of mourners, their heads wrapped in white bandannas, slap their chests, stand in a circle, and with chains flagellate themselves, with daggers beat their heads until blood gushed forth. No matter how young or old, that bleeding head was venerated. And not my blood?

Roya composes a fantastically insightful passage on traditional womanhood—in particular, motherhood—in which women are extolled for their “stillness” and silence. Roya explains what is expected of all good Jewish girls and all good Muslim girls: they “had to be demure and demand nothing.” She and her friend, Zaynab, a “distinctly religious name—the name of the prophet Muhammad’s cousin and wife . . . [and a] name uncommon in the Alley of the Distinguished,” tried their best never to seem too eager for anything, but they were restless; the zealous hand of the revolution had tapped them on their shoulder and tempted them to contemplate their independence.

And, as one of the “women-to-be” in her extended maternal family, Roya was waiting for her future womanhood, “that sublime possibility of which no one had ever spoken.” Dark, " ‘alarmingly thin,’ " according to her parents, and possessing a nose with a bump on the bridge, Roya understood that she may never be as beautiful as her fair-haired cousin Farah, but when she looked in the mirror she “had seen to the heart of the dreamy girl who wanted her share of happiness.”

Soon though, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice was created by the ayatollah to assure that each Iranian citizen mastered every desire by way of its annihilation. Armed guards arrested men in short sleeves, women who wore a hint of makeup, girls whose hair peeked out from their mandatory veils, people drinking alcohol. “All lines that had once separated the citizenry—age, gender, even religion—paled. A new line, invisible but terribly palpable, was drawn. On one side of it, they stood. On the other, we."

In April of 1979, Roya was thrust over this palpable division between she and them. Her actions stand as one of the many poignant and evocative moments in Journey from the Land of No. On the day before the eight-day Passover holiday vacation, Mrs. Moghadam summoned Roya and her classmates for a speech, an “opus long in the making.” Moghadam’s rant centered on the “delicious topic of corporeal sin”:

Do you understand sin? It is of sin that I speak to you. The sin that no ablution can cleanse. Sin that cannot be expiated. For this sin there is no penance, no atonement. No amount of alms can repair its consequences. Once the beast unleashes itself upon your innocence, you’re not a child of Allah anymore. You’re a child of Satan, and appropriate to your kinship, you deserve to receive a hail of stones and nothing less.

Moghadam’s vitriol continued to spew and ended with the announcement that the eight-day vacation was canceled. Rage, rancor, and rebellion was heard in the shouts of “ ‘Down with Moghadam!’ " that came from Roya and her classmates. In a supreme act of defiance, the girls revolted and took to the schoolyard:

Frenzy had overtaken us. But so had an order that ruled our throng in unison. We marched from the yard into the corridor, now vibrating only to our echoes. . . . Never had mayhem brought more peace. All our lives we had been taught the virtues of behaving, and now we were discovering the importance of misbehaving. Too much fear had tainted our days.

Too many afternoons had passed in silence, listening to a fanatic’s diatribes. We were rebelling because we were not evil, we had not sinned. . . . This was 1979, the year that showed us we could make our own destinies. We were rebelling because rebelling was all we could do to quell the rage in our teenage veins. Together as girls we found the courage we had been told was not in us.

By 1984, all of Roya’s brothers had emigrated to America, and the remaining three Hakakians were contemplating doing the same. Iran was in its fourth year of war with Iraq. Anguish was the prevailing sentiment, and “grief and vengeance were the only feelings the public could safely express.” Food rations, a closed-off Tehran University, anti-Semitism and emigration of Jews, and hundreds of thousands killed in the war coalesced into a sense of irrevocable pointlessness.

However, now at age 18, Roya had a feeling that she “was on the brink of one of the most important experiences of [her] life.” Roya called that experience Mrs. Arman, her Persian literature teacher. At long last, Roya had found a powerful force in which to forge optimism and allow the dream of a future beyond fanaticism, female inequality, and repression to flourish.

Journey from the Land of No is an indelible depiction of innocence lost and discernment gained. With prose that is poetic and beautifully rendered, Roya Hakakian’s debut mesmerizes.

Nerd Enough? American Nerds and Nerd Stereotyping: How Caricature Imperils American Society

Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them by David Anderegg, Ph.D.
Hardcover, 274 pages
Publisher: Tarcher/Penguin
Price: $24.95
Publication Date: 2008


Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them by David Anderegg, a clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychology at Bennigton College in Vermont, is a provocative examination of the American nerd/geek stereotype. In Nerds, Anderegg asserts that this ubiquitous typecasting is a "prejudice unlike any other in American culture at present." It's a social pejorative that knows no color or ethnicity, and its negative influence on American society carries far-reaching consequences for the nation's future success.

Most of us can identify the prototypical nerd, can't we? American popular culture perpetuates the nerd/geek stereotype so pervasively that whether it's by way of television, film, literature, or human interaction we're inundated with oversimplified images of individuals whose quirky mannerisms and displayed intelligence are reduced to caricature. Nerd-bashing is overt. We rarely admit that our jibes are degrading and faulty. Antinerd prejudice is consistently tolerated—and therein lies the harm.

"You don't need to belong to any particular class or ethnicity to be a nerd," writes Benjamin Nugent in his perceptive book American Nerd: The Story of My People. It's true. Think of the bookish Steve Urkel of the television sitcom Family Matters, America's favorite black nerd who bore the brunt of the show's comedic insults. Or, the placating and puerile Asian-American math-and-science whiz, Toshiro Takashi, from the classic Revenge of the Nerds. Consider ABC's TV comedy series Ugly Betty featuring Betty Suarez, an awkward Latina who's outfitted in requisite nerd gear: wide-rimmed glasses; braces on her teeth, and unfashionable clothes. "Nerdity," as Anderegg terms it, embraces all—and has for centuries.

If we revisit nineteenth-century American literature and modes of thought—as Anderegg and Nugent do—we discover that nerds and nerd/geek intolerance are not a contemporary phenomenon. It's where we "find the seeds of the modern prejudice," Nugent writes. Anderegg cites Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which introduces us to the anti-intellectual hero Ichabod Crane, "America's first nerd." Nugent identifies the scientifically brilliant "anti-hero" Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley's gothic Frankenstein.

This culturally iconic literature denigrates learning and the learned and venerates physicality and sociability—a persistent attitude of the era that established the nation's longstanding "tradition of being suspicious of intellectual achievement," Anderegg affirms. This standard man of reason versus man of action dichotomy—or, in common parlance, the nerd versus jock opposition—has maintained its impact on our culture. Time and again we devalue those who are technologically inclined and passionate about obtaining knowledge and elevate those who are attractive and exude self-assurance and social poise.

"It's not cool to be smart or to be successful through high achievements in school [or otherwise]," says David Adewumi, CEO of Heekya, a web-based collaborative social storytelling platform, freelance writer for VentureBeat, and author of the blog 3000 Years Later. "Where in several other countries, some form of social pre-eminence is directly related to scholarly achievements and results, in the U.S. the affect is almost nil. From a socio-psychological perspective, in 2008 there is not much social or peer incentive to be considered a very bright young person."

Our 200-year-old promulgation of anti-intellectualism fosters this lack of inducement, while unchecked nerd stereotyping conveys countermotivational messages about self-identity that corrupt and impoverish children. "The kids who will really be hurt by nerd/geek stereotypes are the kids who will shut down parts of themselves to fit in," Anderegg cautions. This curbing of skills is widespread among students throughout the country, and it's predominately in the study of math and science where this pinch of nonparticipation inflicts the most damage. When "Americans are being out-smarted by their international peers," as Adewumi declares, it's not hyperbolic to suggest that math and science illiteracy imperils America's future global competitiveness.

Underachievement of the nerd-labeled isn't solely an academic issue. It's also social, which impacts individuals of diverse ethnicities differently. For many college-bound Asian-Americans, participating in varsity sports and other non-technical pursuits is a way to dismantle Asian nerd stereotypes and appear as well-rounded as their non-Asian contemporaries. For some blacks, as Adewumi notes on his blog, societal acceptance is paramount. "I would say as a young black male, there is a strong inverse correlation between being a nerd and black, and being popular. I’ve seen many black friends who are fairly intelligent that were mediocre students in high school, and either failed out or were equally mediocre at the University level. Why? Popularity is . . . often times a choice of priorities—some sacrifice intelligence for popularity—and for blacks, this probably happens for 9 out of every 10."

American society cleaves to nerd/geek stereotyping. Is it at all surprising then that the "dumbing-down of American culture" prevails? Nerd prejudice disparages as it stigmatizes, and to "understand [the concept of] nerds," writes Benjamin Nugent, "is to enrich our understanding of many demons."