Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays
David P. Gontar, 2013
New English Review Press
428 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780985439491
Summary
Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays is a collection of twenty essays on different aspects of Shakespeare's art. What makes it unique is that it is neither a conventional academic work, nor an exercise in popularization, nor just another authorship biography. Rather it seeks to bring all these discourses together in one jargon-free text which addresses the concerns of both scholars and general readers.
What is at the heart of this book is learning to have the patience and courage to ask again the fundamental questions, and go to Shakespeare himself for guidance. In the real world we find that children often raise the best issues, and adults are led astray by their own rashness and presumptions. For example, a child might ask, Why is not Prince Hamlet made King of Denmark after the death of his father? In their haste, teachers may dismiss such queries instead of using them as threads to be followed into the fabric of the play.
There are no wrong questions. Nothing is taboo. When we are young and immature we suppose that "I am right and everyone else is off base." If we gain a little wisdom we realize that everyone is right. That's what makes life so fascinating. Successful teachers learn to build bridges from every student response to the theme of the lesson. We all make a contribution.
Hamlet Made Simple exposes the student to Shakespeare's words without dictating answers based on sophistication and ideology. Instead, it demonstrates in chapter after chapter that you and I are liable to error, and that even prominent professors of English may be most in need of instruction.
The purpose of Hamlet Made Simple is to so present the challenges of Shakespeare's works that the reader is impelled to view them and re-view them, following performance with study. In that way our understanding and appreciation deepen. If we are lucky, we discover that Shakespeare is not writing about strange individuals with funny names like "Shylock" and "Doll Tearsheet." He is writing about us. Out of the corner of our eyes we note something in this or that character that reminds us just a little bit of ourselves, and, even if we never realize that we are reading about ourselves, we change, we grow.
That is the magic of Shakespeare, the kindest of teachers. Distracting us with the beauty of his art, he works upon our souls, and makes us new. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1945
• Where—State of New York, USA
• Education—Ph. D., Tulane University; J.D.,
Loyala Law School.
• Currently—lives in Inner Mongolia, China
David P. Gontar was born in New York State in 1945. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Tulane University in New Orleans, and a J.D. from Loyola Law School. He has four grown children.
David served as Assitant Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Southern University from 1975 to 1982. Thereafter he was engaged in the practice of law in New Orleans, Louisiana and southern California. He is currently Adjunct Professor of English and Philosophy at Inner Mongolia University in China.
In 2010, he was the English editor of China's application to UNESCO for World Heritage Status of the Xanadu site in Inner Mongolia, granted by UNESCO in June of 2012.
David's writings have appeared in Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Tulane Studies in Philosophy, Plantation Society in the Americas, Loyola Law Review and New English Review. He has monthly publications online at New English Review, including essays on Shakespeare, as well as poetry, aphorisms, parables, stories, and a platonic dialogue.
He hopes to be remembered as the fellow who once observed, "You can't push a wedding cake with a hat pin." (From the author.)
Book Reviews
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Discussion Questions
1. Which do you think is the more significant character, Romeo or Juliet—and why?
2. Is Lucrece in any way responsible for what happens to her?
3. Why do Posthumous Leonatus and Collatine boast about their wives?
4. What is the prognosis for the marriages of Benedick and Beatrice, Portia and Bassanio, Olivia and Sebastian, Lysimachus and Marina & Leontes and Hermione?
5. Why does Brutus kill Caesar?
6. Why does King Harry banish Falstaff?
7. Why can't Hamlet kill Claudius?
8. Why at the outset of Hamlet is the Prince not the King of Denmark?
9. Can a case be made that Macbeth is not ambitious?
10. What is the best interpretation of the Oedipus myth? How does it stand in relation to other myths such as Phaeton, Prometheus, Bellerophon, and Daedalus and Icarus?
11. How does Prince Hal find his way to Eastcheap? What is his connection with Poins?
12. Does Shylock get a fair trial?
13. What are Shakespeare's religious views?
14. Do Kings Henry IV, V and VI have anything in common?
15. Why does King Henry V invade France?
16. Is Measure for Measure a comedy? How so?
17. If you were to set completely aside all biographical information, and confine yourself to the works of Shakespeare and nothing else, what kind of person would you think the author to have been?
18. Does Prospero have anything in common with Caliban?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)
Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
Madeleine Albright, 2012
HarperCollins
467 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062030344
Summary
Before Madeleine Albright turned twelve, her life was shaken by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia—the country where she was born—the Battle of Britain, the near total destruction of European Jewry, the Allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War.
Albright's experiences, and those of her family, provide a lens through which to view the most tumultuous dozen years in modern history. Drawing on her memory, her parents' written reflections, interviews with contemporaries, and newly available documents, Albright recounts a tale that is by turns harrowing and inspiring. Prague Winter is an exploration of the past with timeless dilemmas in mind and, simultaneously, a journey with universal lessons that is intensely personal.
The book takes readers from the Bohemian capital's thousand-year-old castle to the bomb shelters of London, from the desolate prison ghetto of Terezín to the highest councils of European and American government. Albright reflects on her discovery of her family's Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland's tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation.
Often relying on eyewitness descriptions, she tells the story of how millions of ordinary citizens were ripped from familiar surroundings and forced into new roles as exiled leaders and freedom fighters, resistance organizers and collaborators, victims and killers. These events of enormous complexity are nevertheless shaped by concepts familiar to any growing child: fear, trust, adaptation, the search for identity, the pressure to conform, the quest for independence, and the difference between right and wrong.
"No one who lived through the years of 1937 to 1948," Albright writes, "was a stranger to profound sadness. Millions of innocents did not survive, and their deaths must never be forgotten. Today we lack the power to reclaim lost lives, but we have a duty to learn all that we can about what happened and why."
At once a deeply personal memoir and an incisive work of history, Prague Winter serves as a guide to the future through the lessons of the past—as seen through the eyes of one of the international community's most respected and fascinating figures. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 15, 1937
• Where—Prague, Czechoslovakia
• Education—B.A., Wellesley College; M.A., Ph.D.,
Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC, and the state
of Virginia, USA
Madeleine Albright was the first woman to become the United States Secretary of State. She was nominated by US President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996, and was unanimously confirmed by a U.S. Senate vote of 99–0. She was sworn in on January 23, 1997.
A Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University, Albright holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and numerous honorary degrees. In May 2012, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama. Secretary Albright also serves as a Director on the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Albright is fluent in English, French, Russian, and Czech; she speaks and reads Polish and Serbo-Croatian as well.
Early years
Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in the Smichov district of Prague, Czechoslovakia. At the time of her birth, Czechoslovakia had been independent for less than twenty years, having gained independence from Austria-Hungary after World War I. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a Czech Jewish diplomat and supporter of the early Czech democrats, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Benes. She was his first child with his Jewish wife, Anna (nee Spieglova), who later also had another daughter Katherine (a schoolteacher) and son John (an economist).
At the time of Albright’s birth, her father was serving as press-attache at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. However, the signing of the Munich Agreement in March 1938 and the disintegration of Czechoslovakia at the hands of Adolf Hitler forced the family into exile because of their links with Benes. Prior to their flight, Albright's parents had converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. Albright spent the war years in England, while her father worked for Bene’s Czechoslovak government-in-exile. They first lived on Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill, London, where they endured the worst of The Blitz, but later moved to Beaconsfield, then Walton-on-Thames, on the outskirts of London. While in England, a young Albright appeared as a refugee child in a film designed to promote sympathy for all war refugees in London.
Albright was raised Catholic, but converted to Episcopalianism at the time of her marriage in 1959. Albright did not learn until late in life that her parents were Jewish and that many of her Jewish relatives in Czechoslovakia had perished in The Holocaust, including three of her grandparents.
After the defeat of the Nazis in the European Theatre of World War II and the collapse of Nazi Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Albright and family moved back to Prague, where they were given a luxurious apartment in the Hradcany district (which later caused controversy, as it had belonged to an ethnic German Bohemian industrialist family forced out by the Benes decrees. Korbel was named Czechoslovak Ambassador to communist Yugoslavia, and the family moved to Belgrade. Communists governed Yugoslavia, and Korbel was concerned his daughter would be indoctrinated with Marxist ideology in a Yugoslav school, so she was taught by a governess and later sent to the Prealpina Institut pour Jeunes Filles in Chexbres, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Here, she learned French and went by Madeleine, the French version of Madlenka, her Czech nickname.
However, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took over the government in 1948, with support from the Soviet Union, and as an opponent of Communism, Korbel was forced to resign from his position. He later obtained a position on a United Nations delegation to Kashmir, and sent his family to the United States, by way of London, to wait for him when he arrived to deliver his report to the U.N. Headquarters, then in Lake Success, New York. The family arrived in New York City, New York, in November 1948, and initially settled in Great Neck, on Long Island, New York. Korbel applied for political asylum, arguing that as an opponent of Communism, he was now under threat in Prague. With the help of Philip Mosely, a professor of Russian at Columbia University in New York City, Korbel obtained a position on the staff of the political science department at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. He became dean of the university’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, and later taught future U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Life in the United States
Albright spent her teen years in Denver, and graduated from the Kent Denver School in Cherry Hills Village, a suburb of Denver, in 1955, where she founded the school’s international relations club and was its first president. She attended Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on a full scholarship, majoring in political science and graduated in 1959 Her senior thesis was written on Czech Communist Zdenek Fierlinger. She became a U.S. citizen in 1957, and joined the College Democrats of America.
While home in Denver from Wellesley, Albright worked as an intern for The Denver Post, where she met Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, the nephew of Alicia Patterson, owner of Newsday and wife of philanthropist Harry Frank Guggenheim. The couple were married in Wellesley in 1959, shortly after her graduation. They lived first in Rolla, Missouri, while he served his military service at nearby Fort Leonard Wood. During this time, she worked at the Rolla Daily News.
In January 1960, the couple moved to his hometown of Chicago, Illinois, where he worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a journalist, and Albright worked as a picture editor for Encyclopedia Britannica. The following year, Joseph Albright began work at Newsday in New York City, and the couple moved to Garden City on Long Island. That year, she gave birth to twin daughters, Alice Patterson Albright and Anne Korbel Albright. The twins were born six weeks premature, and required a long hospital stay, so as a distraction, Albright began Russian classes at Hofstra University in the Village of Hempstead, New York.
In 1962, the family moved to Georgetown in Washington, D.C., and Albright began studying international relations and continued studying Russian at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. However, in 1963 Alicia Patterson died, and the family returned to Long Island with the notion of Joseph taking over the family business Albright gave birth to another daughter, Katherine Medill Albright, in 1967, and continued her studies at Columbia University. She earned a certificate in Russian, a Masters of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy, writing her Master's thesis on the Soviet diplomatic corps, and her doctoral dissertation on the role of journalists in the Prague Spring of 1968. She also took a graduate course given by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later be her boss at the U.S. National Security Council.
Early career
Albright returned to Washington in 1968, and commuted to Columbia for her Ph.D., which she received in 1975. She began fund-raising for her daughters' school, involvement which led to several positions on education boards. She was eventually invited to organize a fund-raising dinner for the 1972 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator Ed Muskie of Maine. This association with Muskie led to a position as his chief legislative assistant in 1976. However, after the 1976 U.S. presidential election of Jimmy Carter, Albright's former professor Brzezinski was named National Security Advisor, and recruited Albright from Muskie in 1978 to work in the West Wing as the National Security Council’s congressional liaison.
Following Carter's loss in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, Albright moved on to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where she was given a grant for a research project. She chose to write on the dissident journalists involved in Poland's Solidarity movement, then in its infancy but gaining international attention. She traveled to Poland for her research, interviewing dissidents in Gdansk, Warsaw and Krakow. Upon her return to Washington, her husband announced his intention to divorce her for another woman.
Albright joined the academic staff at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1982, specializing in Eastern European studies. She has also directed the University's program on women in global politics. She has also served as a major Democratic Party foreign policy advisor, and briefed Vice-Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988 (both campaigns ended in defeat).
In 1992, Bill Clinton returned the White House to the Democratic Party, and Albright was employed to handle the transition to a new administration at the National Security Council. In January 1993, Clinton nominated her to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, her first diplomatic posting.
Ambassador to the UN
Albright was appointed Ambassador to the United Nations, her first diplomatic post, shortly after Clinton was inaugurated, presenting her credentials on February 9, 1993. During her tenure at the U.N., she had a rocky relationship with the U.N. Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom she criticized as "disengaged" and "neglect[ful]" of genocide in Rwanda.Albright wrote:
My deepest regret from my years in public service is the failure of the United States and the international community to act sooner to halt these crimes.
In Shake Hands with the Devil, Romeo Dallaire claims that in 1994, in Albright's role as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N., she avoided describing the killings in Rwanda as "genocide" until overwhelmed by the evidence for it; this is now how she describes these massacres in her memoirs. She was instructed to support a reduction or withdrawal (something which never happened) of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Rwanda but was later given more flexibility. Albright later remarked in PBS documentary Ghosts of Rwanda that
it was a very, very difficult time, and the situation was unclear. You know, in retrospect, it all looks very clear. But when you were [there] at the time, it was unclear about what was happening in Rwanda.
Also in 1996, after Cuban military pilots shot down two small civilian aircraft flown by the Cuban-American exile group Brothers to the Rescue over international waters, she announced, "This is not cojones. This is cowardice." The line endeared her to President Clinton, who said it was "probably the most effective one-liner in the whole administration's foreign policy."
On May 12, 1996, Albright defended UN sanctions against Iraq on a 60 Minutes segment in which Lesley Stahl asked her
We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" and Albright replied "we think the price is worth it.
Albright later criticized Stahl's segment as "amount[ing] to Iraqi propaganda"; said that her question was a loaded question; wrote "I had fallen into a trap and said something I did not mean"; and regretted coming "across as cold-blooded and cruel." Sanctions critics took Albright's failure to reframe the question as confirmation of the statistic. The segment won an Emmy Award.
Secretary of State
When Albright took office as the 64th U.S. Secretary of State on January 23, 1997, she became the first female U.S. Secretary of State and the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. Because she was not a natural-born citizen of the U.S., she was not eligible as a U.S. Presidential successor and was excluded from nuclear contingency plans. In her position as Secretary of State, Albright reinforced the U.S.'s alliances; advocated democracy and human rights; and promoted American trade and business, labor and environmental standards abroad.
During her tenure, Albright considerably influenced American policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Middle East. She incurred the wrath of a number of Serbs in the former Yugoslavia for her role in participating in the formulation of US policy during the Kosovo War and Bosnian war as well as the rest of the Balkans. But, together with President Bill Clinton, she remains a largely popular figure in the rest of the region, especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Croatia. According to Albright's memoirs, she once argued with Colin Powell for the use of military force by asking, "What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can't use it?"
As Secretary of State she represented the U.S. at the Transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong on July 1, 1997. She boycotted the swearing-in ceremony of the China-appointed Hong Kong Legislative Council, which replaced the elected one, along with the British contingents.
According to several accounts, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Prudence Bushnell repeatedly asked Washington for additional security at the embassy in Nairobi, including in an April 1998 letter directly to Albright. Bushnell was ignored. In Against All Enemies Richard Clarke writes about an exchange with Albright several months after the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in August 1998. "What do you think will happen if you lose another embassy?" Clarke asked. "The Republicans in Congress will go after you." "First of all, I didn't lose these two embassies," Albright shot back. "I inherited them in the shape they were." Albright was booed in 1998 when the brief war threat with Iraq revealed that citizens were opposed to such an invasion, although this is often overlooked.
In 1998, at the NATO summit, Albright articulated what would become known as the "three Ds" of NATO, "which is no diminution of NATO, no discrimination and no duplication—because I think that we don't need any of those three "Ds" to happen."
Both Bill Clinton and Albright insisted that an attack on Hussein could be stopped only if Hussein reversed his decision to halt arms inspections. "Iraq has a simple choice. Reverse course or face the consequences," Albright said.
In 2000, Albright became one of the highest level Western diplomats ever to meet Kim Jong-il, the communist leader of North Korea, during an official state visit to that country.
In one of her last acts as Secretary of State, Albright on January 8, 2001, paid a farewell call on Kofi Annan and said that the U.S. would continue to press Iraq to destroy all its weapons of mass destruction as a condition of lifting economic sanctions, even after the end of the Clinton administration on January 20, 2001.
Post-2001 career
In 2001, Albright was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The same year, she founded the Albright Group, an international strategy consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. It has Coca-Cola, Merck, Dubai Ports World, and Marsh & McLennan Companies among its clients, who benefit from the access that Albright has through her global contacts. Affiliated with the firm is Albright Capital Management, which was founded in 2005 to engage in private fund management related to emerging markets.
Albright currently serves on the Council on Foreign Relations Board of directors and on the International Advisory Committee of the Brookings Doha Center. She is also currently the Mortara Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C..
In 2003, she accepted a position on the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange. In 2005, Albright declined to run for re-election to the board in the aftermath of the Richard Grasso compensation scandal, in which Grasso, the chairman of the NYSE Board of Directors, had been granted $187.5 million in compensation, with little governance by the board on which Albright sat. During the tenure of the interim chairman, John S. Reed, Albright served as chairwoman of the NYSE board's nominating and governance committee. Shortly after the appointment of the NYSE board's permanent chairman in 2005, Albright submitted her resignation.
On October 25, 2005, Albright guest starred on the television drama Gilmore Girls as herself.
On January 5, 2006, she participated in a meeting at the White House of former Secretaries of Defense and State to discuss U.S. foreign policy with George W. Bush administration officials. On May 5, 2006, she was again invited to the White House to meet with former Secretaries and Bush administration officials to discuss Iraq.
In an interview given to Newsweek International published July 24, 2006, Albright gave her opinion on current U.S. foreign policy. Albright said: "I hope I'm wrong, but I'm afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy – worse than Vietnam."
Albright has mentioned her physical fitness and exercise regimen in several interviews. She has said she is capable of leg pressing 400 pounds. Albright was listed as one of the fifty best-dressed over 50s by the Guardian in March 2013. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/20/2013.)
Book Reviews
A gripping account of World War II.... In taut prose, Albright weaves a powerful narrative that wraps her family’s story into the larger political drama unfolding in Europe.
Philadelphia Inquirer
A riveting tale of her family’s experience in Europe during World War II [and] a well-wrought political history of the region, told with great authority.... More than a memoir, this is a book of facts and action.
Los Angeles Times
A compelling personal exploration of [Albright’s] family’s Jewish roots as well as an excellent history of Czechoslovakia from 1937 to 1948.... Highly informative and insightful.... I can’t recommend Prague Winter highly enough.
Washington Post Book World
In the crowded field of memoirs written by former secretaries of state, Madeleine Albright’s books stand out... Albright is a charming and entertaining storyteller.
New York Review of Books
Albright’s book is a sprightly historical narrative of this long decade.... Her account of the destruction of inter-war Czechoslovakia, both as a geographical entity and as an idea of democracy, first by the Nazis and then by the Communists, is balanced and vivid.
Economist
A blend of history and memoir that reveals in rich, poignant and often heartbreaking detail a story that had been hidden from her by her own parents.... The beating heart of the book is Albright’s searing account of her intimate family saga.
Jewish Journal
An extraordinary book.... Albright artfully presents a wrenching tale of horror and darkness, but also one in which decent and brave people again and again had their say.
New Republic
(Starred review.) The author’s childhood reminiscences of her first 11 years and savvy grasp of history inform this absorbing account of Czechoslovakia’s travails and Albright’s family’s suffering in the Holocaust.... The story is enriched by Albright’s colorful thumbnails of Eduard Benes, Jan Masaryk, and other principals and by her insights into geopolitics, which yield sympathetic but clear-eyed assessments of the compromises statesmen made to accommodate the ruthless powers surrounding Czechoslovakia. Showing us villainy, heroism, and agonizing moral dilemmas, Albright’s vivid storytelling and measured analysis brings this tragic era to life.
Publishers Weekly
Most people are aware of the result of the Munich agreement in 1938. Albright (born Marie Jana Korbelova), the first female U.S. secretary of state, provides a deeper account of the Czech Republic's road to independence. From Prague to the Terezin concentration camp (where many of her Jewish relatives perished) to the "winter" of the republic's existence as it endured the dictatorships of the Nazis and then the Communists, Albright details the situations and personalities prominent in this struggle.... The accessible style and inclusion of notes and timelines make this an excellent addition to any library. —Maria Bagshaw, Elgin Community Coll. Lib., IL
Library Journal
The former U.S. secretary of state blends World War II-era history and memoir.... The most gripping parts are those personal stories; the others mostly repeat what can be found in many histories of the war and Holocaust. Retellings do not, of course, diminish the horror, but Albright sometimes focuses more on the politics and the war than on the remembrance.... Also engaging are the later sections, which deal with the postwar politics in Czechoslovakia, especially the communists' moves to subvert the fledgling democracy.... [T]he personal...animates and brightens the narrative.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
1. Talk abouth the book's title. What is meant by the term "Prague Winter"?
2. Describe the cultural differences between the Czechs and Slovaks.
3. Follow-up to Question 2: What were the differing visions for the country, during the intervening war years, of Masaryk and Benes vs. those of Stefanik and Hodza?
4. Discuss the impact of the 1938 Munich Agreement on Czechoslavakia as described by Albright. In what way is Munich a scar on the nation's psychic? What is meant by the famous outcry"about us, without us"? Who does Albright blame for the sell-out? What was (or was not) the role of the US?
5. Albright delivers a history lesson about the World War II era from the Czechoslovakian prospective. Has that approach altered or enlarged your understanding of the war years?
6. How does Albright describe Tito's takeover in 1948?
7. To what does Albright attribute the Czech Republic's "Atlanticism," it's strong attachment to America?
8. How does Albright view the 2009 "open letter" to Barak Obama from Central European intellectuals and politicians in which they bemoaned the decline in transatlantic ties? Why does Albright consider it "whiny"? Is she correct?
9. Why do Albright's parents convert to Catholicism? Talk about her shock at the later discovery of her Jewish heritage. How would such a discovery affect your own sense of identity?
10. Near the end of her book, Albright writes about "the capacity within us for unspeakable cruelty or...at least some degree of moral cowardice....
There is a piece of the traitor within most of us, a slice of collaborator, an aptitude for appeasement, a touch of the unfeeling prison guard. Who among us has not dehumanized others, if not by word or action, then at least in thought? From the maternity ward to the deathbed, all that goes on within our breasts is hardly sweetness and light. Some have concluded from this that what is needed from our leaders is an iron hand, an ideology that explains everything, or a historical grievance that can serve as a center of our lives.
Do you agree with those sentiments? Do you see yourself in that statement?
11. In the same vein as Question 10: What do you make of Vaclav Havel who saw humanity divided into two groups: those who "wait for Godot" and those who insist on "speaking the truth." What did Havel mean? Which group would you place yourself under?
12. In what way might Albright's book serve as a guidepost for our own times? What lessons can we learn from the history of world events recounted in Prague Winter?
13. The book is both history and memoir. Which parts most engaged you—the personal or the historical?
14. Why, according to Madeleine Albright, is it important that the world remember the events of 1938-1945?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Accidental Anarchist: From the Diaries of Jacob Marateck
Bryna Kranzler, 2010 *
Crosswalk Press
338 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780984556304
Summary
The Accidental Anarchist is the true story of Jacob Marateck, an Orthodox Jew who was sentenced to death three times in the early 1900s—in Russia—and lived to tell about it. He also happened to have been the author's grandfather.
The book is based on the diaries that Marateck began keeping in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War. A Jew who was conscripted into the notoriously anti-Semitic Russian army, Marateck led soldiers during the war who wanted to kill him, simply for being a Jew, at least as much as the enemy did, simply for being in the way. Not content to merely survive, following the war Marateck joined the incompetent Polish revolutionary underground movement that sought to overthrow the Czar.
It was in that capacity that he was caught, arrested, and casually sentenced to death for the third time. His life was saved by the intervention of a young girl who picked up a note he dropped he dropped in the street, which resulted in the third death sentence being commuted to ten years of hard labor in Siberia, followed by permanent exile.
But Marateck escaped from Siberia with Warsaw's colorful "King of Thieves." Together, the unlikely pair traveled 3000 miles by to Warsaw, without food, money or legal papers, where Marateck decided to search for the young girl who had saved his life. Her name was Bryna, and she became the author's grandmother and namesake.
The Accidental Anarchist, told in Marateck's own voice, is filled with rare humor and optimism that made it possible for him to survive. (From the publisher.)
* Translators: Shimon Wincelberg and Anita Marateck Wincelberg
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1957-1958
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard, M.B.A., Yale
University
• Awards—see below
• Currently—N/A
Bryna Kranzler is a graduate of Barnard College where she studied playwriting, and received the Helen Price Memorial Prize for Dramatic Composition. Her first play was a finalist for the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater Competition, and was scheduled for production twice: the first time, the theater owner died, and the season was shut down; the second time, the director committed suicide.
For the benefit of the arts community, she got out of playwriting and earned an MBA from Yale University to make up for her misspent youth. She spent 15 years in marketing for health-care, high tech and consumer products companies before returning to writing.
Her first book, The Accidental Anarchist, is the winner of multiple awards, including the 2012 Sharp Writ Book Award for General Non-Fiction, the 2012 Readers Favorite Award for Historical/Cultural Non-Fiction, the 2012 International Book Award, and National Indie Excellence Award for a Historical Biography, and the 2011 “USA Best Books” Award for a Historical Biography.
Born in Los Angeles, Kranzler is the daughter of Shimon Wincelberg, the first Orthodox writer in Hollywood. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Marateck is an extraordinary character facing certain death many times with consistent humor and steadfast faith in God. The reader certainly does not need to be an Orthodox Jew to appreciate the intense commitment Marateck has to his faith and his religious duty. His notes reveal a breathtaking ability to absorb the absurd that life dishes out to a lowly Jew in the Czar’s anti-Semitic army with aplomb and grace.
New York Journal of Books
“There was simply too much fun to be had.” Reality and three narrowly dodged death sentences kind of puts a damper on that illusion as 13-year old Jacob Marateck, citing “the ignorance of youth and a desire for grand adventure,” leaves his small Polish hometown to seek some rudderless escapades in the Warsaw of the absorbing and often black-humored true story The Accidental Anarchist. Indeed, the adventures in this novel are many, and unforeseen. Variety-spiced life mixed with historical events of the 1900s in Russia and Poland sees Marateck moving on from student to baker’s assistant, labor organizer to an officer in the Russian army during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 against the Japanese in China.
Seattle Post Intelligencer
Bryna Kranzler has masterfully pulled together the notes and journal entries of her forbearer, Yakov (Jacob) Marateck, and turned them into a warm, enchanting, readable Jewish saga, with all the richness of pre-Bolshevik color and Polish-ethnic splendor. To dive into “The Accidental Anarchist,” at 334 pages, is to lunge into a whole different world and time that draws one into the spirit of the times and the mind of Yakov. Yet, the reader, whether a Goy (Gentile) like myself, an adult or a teen, is not left behind by incomprehensible words and phrases.
Reader Views.com
I found myself so fascinated by The Accidental Anarchist that I thought about it at work, wondered what would happen during dinner, and picked it up each night before bed. Several nights I went to sleep much later than I had intended because I was simply unaware how much time was passing. One reason for this is that Kranzler does a remarkable job of turning a life into a narrative. The reader knows what drives Marateck and wants to know whether or not he achieves his goal.
Kate Brauning - Bookshelf.com
Discussion Questions
1. Why did Jacob Marateck began keeping a diary?
2. What role did friendship play in the book?
3. What role did women play in Marateck’s survival?
4. Would you have made the same moral choices that Marateck made (eg., helping his army friend get transferred to another regiment, rejecting Pyavka’s suggestion for what they needed to do to get home) under the same circumstances?
5. What were the most important survival skills that Jacob Marateck demonstrated?
6. Who was your favorite character, and why?
7. How do the political, social and economic circumstances that preceded the Russian Revolutions compare with those in recent history in other countries?
8. Does this book have the same relevance for non-Jews as well as Jews?
9. What messages did you take from this book, and are they still relevant today?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Bryna Kranzler has also provided additional information to enhance your understanding and discussion of The Accidental Anarchist.
Background
Jacob Marateck began keeping the diaries that were turned into The Accidental Anarchist in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War. That was when he decided that he needed to overthrow the Czar. He filled about 282 pages with his impeccable Yiddish penmanship until he was distracted by the death sentences, sentence to and escape from Siberia, and the need to flee to the United States.
Once he arrived in the Polish mining town of Shenandoah, PA, to which two of his brothers had already emigrated, he began telling stories of his experiences as a Jewish soldier, and later officer, in the Russian army, as well as what it was like to live as a Jew in the Russian-occupied territories at a time when anti-Semitism was the official government policy.
But what distinguished his stories was not merely his eyewitness account of a period of time that we, in the United States, know very little about (despite the fact that it changed the balance of powers in the world); it was his unique take on the situation that he described with a rare sense of humor that was not irreverent or self-deprecating so much as it was ironic. His storytelling style makes it easy to read about what were intolerable circumstances
Historical Context
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was ostensibly fought over a warm-weather port in Manchuria, but in reality the reason for the war was quite different: Czar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov Dynasty, had been hearing rumblings about revolution (not surprisingly because everyone in the Russian-occupied territories was starving).
Rather than addressing the problem directly, such as by giving some of the noblemen’s land back to the peasants (which the nobility opposed, of course), the Czar decided that having a “quick and easy” war would be the best way to distract the population, raise their patriotism, and put to reset all that ‘nonsense’ about revolution. So the Czar violated terms of an earlier treaty with Japan, which provoked the Japanese to attack Port Arthur. Russia used this attack as an excuse to declare war.
Despite the fact that Russia declared what became known as the Russo-Japanese War (February 8, 1904-September 5, 1905) the Russian Army was completely unprepared to fight, going to war with technology and strategies that had last been employed thirty years earlier, during the Russo-Turkish War. The Russians completely underestimated the Japanese, and their defeats began almost immediately.
But since the War was not being fought so much for a strategic as much as for a political purpose, the Czar would not allow the War to end and kept sending young men to their deaths. And in 1905, Jacob Marateck began documenting the many ways that the Czar had let down his own people.
The War changed the balance of power in the world as Russia fell off its perch as a superpower, while Japan emerged onto the world stage as the first Asian nation to defeat a European nation. It took the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt to negotiate a truce between Russia and Japan to end the war, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Murder in the High Himalaya: Loyalty, Tragedy, and Escape from Tibet
Jonathan Green, 2010
Public Affairs
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781586489595
Summary
Murder in the High Himalaya is the incredible true story of two teenage girls, best friends, from rural Tibet who decided to risk everything for a dream they nursed since childhood to meet the Dalai Lama.
To do so they would cross three countries away in a highly perilous journey that would take them over the passes of the mighty and brutal High Himalaya in defiance of the China’s mighty military machine. It’s the story of those who give everything for freedom and those still, who sacrifice everything to tell the truth.
Cho Oyu Mountain lies 19 miles east of Mount Everest on the border between Tibet and Nepal. To the elite mountaineering community, it’s known as the sixth highest mountain in the world. To Tibetans, Cho Oyu represents a gateway to freedom through a secret glacial path: the Nangpa La.
On September 30, 2006, gunfire echoed through the thin air near Advance Base Camp on Cho Oyu and climbers preparing to summit watched in horror as Chinese border guards fired at a group of Tibetans fleeing to India, via Nepal.
Murder in the Himalaya is the unforgettable account of the brutal killing of Kelsang Namtso—a seventeen-year-old Tibetan nun fleeing with the group to Dharamsala to escape religious persecution. Kelsang’s death is a painful example of Tibet’s oppression by China, but this time a human rights atrocity was witnessed and documented by dozens of Western climbers. Their moral dilemma was plain—would they tell the world what they had seen, risking their chance to climb in China again, or would they pass on by?
At the center of the story is a young, Tibetan girl who has sacrificed her right to return to Tibet by bearing witness to the murder of her best friend to the western media. She risked her future to expose the abuses of China in Tibet and paid the price.
For the last three years, award-winning investigative reporter Jonathan Green, funded partially by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Investigative Reporters and Editors, has travelled the remote parts of the Himalaya researching this amazing story. He introduces us to the disparate band of adventurers and survivors who were at the “rooftop of the world” that fateful morning, as he seeks an answer for one woman’s life.
In this probing investigation, an affecting portrait of modern Tibet emerges—one which raises enduring questions about morality, and how far one will go to achieve freedom.
(From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, UK
• Education—St. Joseph's College (Ipswich)
• Awards—see below
• Currently—lives in the state of Massachusetts, USA
Jonathan Green is an award-winning author and investigative journalist specializing in narrative non-fiction. He has reported from Sudan on jihadist militias, the guerilla-controlled jungles of Colombia on the cocaine trade, corruption in oil-rich Kazakhstan, the destruction of the rainforest in Borneo, undercover in the Himalayan mountains in Tibet and Nepal tracking refugee routes, down an illegal gold mine in Africa while investigating human rights abuses along with the gang-controlled favelas of Brazil, the townships of Johannesburg and the garrisons of Jamaica among many other demanding assignments around the globe.
Recognition
His first book, the critically acclaimed Murder in the High Himalaya won the coveted Banff Mountain Book Competition in the Mountain and Wilderness Category in 2011. It also won the American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Non Fiction Book of the Year in 2011. The book is endorsed by the Dalai Lama and actor Richard Gere.
Green has been the recipient of the Amnesty International Media Award for Excellence in Human Rights Journalism, the American Society of Journalists and Authors award for reporting on a significant topic, Environment story of the year at the Foreign Press Association, the North American Travel Journalists Association for Sports in Conjunction with Travel and Feature Writer of the Year in the Press Gazette Magazine and Design Awards. His work has been anthologized in the Best American Crime Writing. On winning Exclusive of the Year at the Magazine Design and Journalism Awards the judges said, “It shows Green’s painstaking research and dogged determination and belief that a story must be followed to the bitter end.”
Journalism
Jonathan has written for hundreds of clients around the world and his work has been translated into at least twenty languages. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Men’s Journal, The Sunday Times Magazine, Men’s Health, Esquire (UK), Fast Company, GQ (UK), The Guardian, Best Life, The Observer Magazine, Hemispheres, Daily Telegraph Magazine, Marie Claire, The Scotsman Magazine, Car, South China Morning Post Magazine, The Australian, Mail on Sunday’s Live Magazine, Bike, Readers Digest, The Financial Times, The Times Magazine, and Worth, among many others.
Jonathan has been interviewed about his work on CNN, the BBC, radio and television, and NPR among others. He has done scores of speaking engagements at universities, colleges and companies about his work, investigative journalism, human and environmental issues and his latest book, Murder in the High Himalaya.
Adventure
Jonathan has a love of adventure. He has skydived from 30,000ft with Special Forces Soldiers in a HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) parachute jump, scuba dived under ice, ridden a bull in a rodeo school, speared fish with soldiers at 90ft under the ocean off Guantanamo Bay, raced in a Dodge Viper at 215mph before having a blow out in the Nevada desert, paraglided with eagles in the high Himalaya in Nepal, flown in aerial dogfights pulling 7 g’s, ridden a jet ski the entire length of the Mississippi, been to 2000ft under the ocean in a homemade submarine and snowkited Alaska’s mythical Bagley Icefield in -30 temperatures. He was once beaten up by skinheads in a London pub while investigating the far right in Britain. He has interviewed murderers, rapists, terrorists, car thieves, gangsters’ molls, gangsters, Aryan supremacists and street gang members.
He is a keen motorcyclist, fencer, cyclist, shooter and scuba diver—and lives in Massachusetts. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
At the heart of Jonathan Green's new book is an ugly encounter that underscores both China's barbarous treatment of Tibetans and the West's confused, thin-blooded response to it. In September 2006 Chinese border guards shot dead a 17-year old nun, Kelsang Namtso, in front of dozens of international mountaineers on a pass between Nepal and Tibet. A Romanian climber filmed the killing, which was broadcast around the world.... "They are shooting them like dogs," said the Romanian, as he filmed. Namtso's murder presented the mountaineers with a problem. Some guides wanted to prevent news of the incident from leaving camp as they feared the Chinese would retaliate by banning them from the mountain. Against heated squabbling, though, several climbers contacted the media and the murder made international headlines. By personalising Namtso's life and death, Mr Green has conjured in the flesh an otherwise anonymous figure from Tibet's shadows.
Economist (June 2010)
A word is missing from the subtitle of Jonathan Green's shocking exposé: cowardice. It shines out of his story of the murder of the 17-year-old Tibetan nun, Kelsang Namtso.... At least 100 foreign climbers and their Western guides saw the entire event. Almost all of them, including the guides, ignored Kelsang lying in the snow, and the wounded Tibetans begging for help, and either continued their climbs or came down from the base camp, determined to keep silent about what they had witnessed. Entrepreneurs were terrified that the Chinese would shut down the lucrative climbing business. Although the author includes information about Tibet past and present that many readers will find useful, the core of this book is Kelsang's murder and its implications, which Green, an experienced journalist, recounts vividly and with scrupulous attention to evidence.... The Chinese might have got away with this lie. But a Romanian journalist climber, Sergiu Matei, had risked filming the murder of Kelsang. His footage was shown on Romanian television, and soon BBC and CNN were broadcasting it internationally.... [Green] shows himself to be a first-class reporter who managed to speak to Tibetan survivors of the ill- fated trip as well as to Western witnesses. He reserves his greatest admiration for the two best friends, Dolma, who survived and spoke to Green, and Kelsang, who died alone in the snow. The girls were determined to escape from Tibet at all costs, meet the Dalai Lama, and "untainted by the great evil of our age, cynicism," which afflicts so many doing business with China, tell the world what they knew.
Spectator (July 2010)
Getting the Dalai Lama to write the foreword to your book won't do it any harm, but then the story contained within Jonathan Green's Murder in the High Himalaya deserves all the attention it can get. In 2006, a young Tibetan nun was shot dead by Chinese border guards near Mount Everest as she was fleeing persecution along with a group of fellow countrymen and women. In this lucid and penetrating account, investigative journalist Jonathan Green delves into the background of the story and the events leading up to it, exposing the terrible persecution endemic in the so-called 'roof of the world.' Rich in detail yet precise and clear-eyed, it is a formidable piece of social reporting.
The Big Issue
On September 30, 2006, a 17-year-old nun named Kelsang Namtso was murdered by Chinese border guards as she tried to escape Chinese-occupied Tibet. The torture and outright slaughter of Tibetans by the Chinese has been well-documented by various human-rights organizations, but this time...dozens of Western climbers witnessed the act. Their moral dilemma was patent—tell the world and risk being banned from Tibet, or keep quite. Incredibly, in an age where every basecamp has e-mail, most climbers remained silent. Jonathan Green, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Men's Journal and Esquire, deftly recounts the stories of American climbing guide Luis Benitez (the first climber to speak out about the murder) and Namtso's best friend, Dolma, as they wrestle with their consciences, decide to bear witness and pay a great price. Some in the community of high-altitude guides ostracized Benitez, claiming he was placing a desire for fame above his responsibility to his clients. Subsequently, Benitez lost his income, profession and second family. Dolma could be exiled from her homeland for life. Green's accounts of the politics of high-altitude guiding are meticulously researched, balanced and riveting, and offer climbers a rare view of the booming business and internecine struggles at the top of the world. If you care about the ethics of mountaineering in the 21st century and the incredibly rich, threatened culture of Tibet, you simply must read this book.
Rock and Ice (May 2010)
Jonathan Green has meticulously reconstructed events surrounding Kelsang’s life and death. His well-written account will hook readers from the first page... Despite the obstacles he encountered, Green has written an absorbing adventure story about a forbidding mountain range and a band of refugees who risked everything to reach the Dalai Lama, who continues to lead a campaign to publicize the plight of the Tibetan people.
Palm Beach Arts Paper (September 2010)
Jonathan Green's descriptions of the scenery of the High Plateau are breathtaking, even on the page—a region of 46,000 glaciers, "the biggest ice fields outside of the Arctic and Antarctic"; "forests of juniper, oak, ash, spruce, cypress, and jungles of rhododendron"; a "vast wilderness" full of snow leopards and Tibetan Blue Bear, monkeys and red pandas, giant griffon vultures and golden eagles. In this landscape the bullets of the Chinese soldiers reverberate. "The bright snow mushroomed into a brilliant red stain around her body," Green writes of the shooting. "She was minutes from the border."
Los Angeles Times (July 2010)
A thrilling investigation into the 2006 murder of a Tibetan nun who tried to flee to India, witnessed by her best friend. Investigative journalist Jonathan Green spent three years tracking down what happened to 17-year-old Kelsang Namtso, a Tibetan nun who was killed by Chinese border guards while she attempted to flee to India, and the result of his findings are brilliantly told in Murder in the High Himalaya: Loyalty, Tragedy and Escape From Tibet. This captivating account follows Namtso on her journey with her best friend through a secret glacial path that is well-known to elite mountaineers, but forbidden for refugees fleeing China. Her murder by the Chinese border guards was caught on film by Western climbers, but they were faced with the question: Should they report the murder and never be allowed to climb in China again? Some risked talking to Green, who was partially funded by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Investigative Reporters and Editors.
Daily Beast (June 2010)
On Sept. 30, 2006, Chinese border troops opened fire on a group of Tibetans trying to escape their occupied land over the icy Nangpa La pass at Cho Oyu Mountain, the world’s sixth-tallest peak. One refugee was killed, a 17-year-old Buddhist nun named Kelsang Namtso, shot in the back only moments away from the top of the pass and safety in Nepal. There are about 30 shooting incidents a year, barely noticed in the West, at the border. But there was something different about this one: it took place in full view of dozens of Western mountain climbers, some of whom captured it on film.... And thereby hangs a tale, spun wonderfully in Green’s morally ambiguous account.... Despite their satellite connections, at first no news leaked out from the climbers. They had a lot at stake: money, ego, safety and, for some—but not all—their souls.... Who spoke out and who did not, and why, is at the heart of one of the most unsettling books of recent years.
McCleans
On September 30, 2006, near Cho Oyu mountain in the high Himalaya, Chinese border guards opened fire on a group of Tibetans attempting to flee to Nepal via the Nanga La, a mountain path popular as an escape route. Many of those in the group died.... [Green interviewed] a large number of surviving witnesses, including Tibetan refugees, sherpas, Western mountaineers and a Romanian documentary maker who captured the horrifying incident on film.... At the center of Green's gripping story stand Dolma Palkyi and Dolkar Tsomo and their determination to journey to Dharamsala to meet the exiled Dalai Lama. Off to one side are the mountaineers who witness atrocities but remain stonily silent (Green asserts that many don't want to endanger future access to the mountains by alienating Chinese authorities). In the end, distressing moral dilemmas of our time emerge from this tale of religious pilgrims gunned down on an icy mountain path within view of self-absorbed climbers thinking only of their next summit.
John McFarland - Shelf Awareness
A shattering tale that will appeal to readers of all things about Tibet, mountaineering, human rights and the preservation of cultural integrity.
Shelf Awareness
A gripping take of routine murder that would have gone unreported but for the fact that a group of Western climbers were silent witnesses to the killing of a young Tibetan woman attempting to cross the border into India. Jonathan Green has travelled to the region to research the story, he’s interviewed witnesses, other refugees and even the Dalai Lama to tell this shocking and complicated story of how Chinese border guards, instructed to protect the border at any cost, will shoot to kill.
Bookseller - Ones to Watch (April 2010)
The cold-blooded slaying of a runaway Tibetan teenager ignites worldwide concern about the violent oppression at “the roof of the world. For three years, American journalist Green travelled to remote sections of [the Himalaya] to investigate the murder of a young nun who died at the hands of Chinese border officials.... As a spiritual exile from communism, Kelsang [Namtso] realized she was now a target of the aggressive Chinese government and must flee for her life. Green injects Kelsang and Dolma [Palkyi]’s great escape with anxious tension.... “Minutes from the border,” Kelsang was mercilessly shot by patrol guards, and the scene was observed by senior Everest mountaineer Luis Benitez, who was concurrently guiding a group nearby. China’s relentless campaign of obfuscation and blamelessness ensued, and Tibetans continued to flee, unabated by the violence. Green’s steely, factually dense analysis of this unlawful conspiracy sheds light on a perennial human-rights crisis.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What would you have done if you had witnessed a murder?
3. Is China a friendly or a hostle power in the world today?
4. What is the religious theme of this story?
5. Which character was the most changed by the events that took place on Choy Oyu in 2006?
Bolivar: American Liberator
Marie Arana, 2013
Simon & Schuster
603 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439110195
Summary
It is astonishing that Simon Bolivar, the great Liberator of South America, is not better known in the United States. He freed six countries from Spanish rule, traveled more than 75,000 miles on horseback to do so, and became the greatest figure in Latin American history.
His life is epic, heroic, straight out of Hollywood: he fought battle after battle in punishing terrain, forged uncertain coalitions of competing forces and races, lost his beautiful wife soon after they married and never remarried (although he did have a succession of mistresses, including one who held up the revolution and another who saved his life), and he died relatively young, uncertain whether his achievements would endure.
Drawing on a wealth of primary documents, novelist and journalist Marie Arana brilliantly captures early nineteenth-century South America and the explosive tensions that helped revolutionize Bolívar. In 1813 he launched a campaign for the independence of Colombia and Venezuela, commencing a dazzling career that would take him across the rugged terrain of South America, from Amazon jungles to the Andes mountains. From his battlefield victories to his ill-fated marriage and legendary love affairs, Bolivar emerges as a man of many facets: fearless general, brilliant strategist, consummate diplomat, passionate abolitionist, gifted writer, and flawed politician.
A major work of history, Bolivar colorfully portrays a dramatic life even as it explains the rivalries and complications that bedeviled Bolívar’s tragic last days. It is also a stirring declaration of what it means to be a South American. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1949
• Where—Peru
• Raised—United States
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University; M.A., Hong
Kong University: certificate of scholarship, Yale
University
• Currently—lives in Washington D.C.
Marie Arana is an author, editor, journalist, and member of the Scholars Council at the Library of Congress.
Arana was born in Peru, the daughter of Jorge Arana, a Peruvian born civil engineer, and Marie Campbell Arana, she moved with her family to the United States at the age of 9, achieved her B.A. in Russian at Northwestern University, her M.A. in linguistics at Hong Kong University, a certificate of scholarship at Yale University in China, and began her career in book publishing, where she was vice president and senior editor at Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster.
For more than a decade she was the editor in chief of "Book World", the book review section of The Washington Post, during which time she instituted the partnership of The Washington Post with the White House (First Lady Laura Bush) and the Library of Congress (Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress) in hosting the annual National Book Festival on the Washington Mall. She currently sits on the board of the National Book Festival. Arana is a Writer at Large for The Washington Post. She is married to Jonathan Yardley, the Post's chief book critic, and has two children from a previous marriage, Lalo Walsh and Adam Ward.
Marie Arana is the author of a memoir about a bicultural childhood American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (finalist for the 2001 National Book Award as well as the Martha PEN/Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir); editor of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer's craft, The Writing Life (2002); and the author of Cellophane (a satirical novel set in the Peruvian Amazon, published in 2006, and a finalist for the John Sargent Prize). Her most recent novel, published in January 2009, is Lima Nights. She has written the introductions for many books, among them a National Geographic book of aerial photographs of South America, Through the Eyes of the Condor. Her biography of Venezuelan military and political leader, Simon Bolivar—Bolivar: American Liberator—was published in 2013.
Arana has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. For many years, she has directed literary events for the Americartes Festivals at the Kennedy Center. She has been a judge for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award as well as for the National Book Critics Circle. Her commentary has been published in USA Today, Smithsonian magazine, National Geographic, and numerous other literary publications throughout the Americas.
Arana was an Invited Research Scholar at Brown University in 2008-2009. In October 2009, Arana received the Alumnae Award of the Year at Northwestern University.
In April 2009, Arana was named John W. Kluge Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress through 2010. In September 2009, she was elected to the Scholars' Council of the Library of Congress as well as the Board of Directors of the National Book Festival. She is currently Senior Consultant to the Librarian of Congress. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Most North American historians, including me, have mentioned [Bolivar] only in passing, usually making "the George Washington of Latin America" reference, as though his life merits attention only when viewed through a North American prism. The hemispheric condescension inherent in that conception obviously needed correction in the form of a comprehensive biography that makes Bolivar's life accessible to a large readership in the United States. Bolivar is unquestionably that book…As befits its subject, Bolivar is magisterial in scope, written with flair and an almost cinematic sense of history happening…We might call Arana's style Bolivarian—colorful, passionate, daring, verging on novelistic.
Joseph J. Ellis - Washington Post
Wonderful.... In Arana's energetic and highly readable telling, Bolivar comes alive as having willed himself an epic life.... She brings great verve and literary flair to her biography of Bolivar.
Hector Tobar - Los Angeles Times
The George Washington of South America cuts a dashing though dark-edged and ultimately tragic figure in this rousing biography. Peruvian journalist Arana (American Chica) chronicles Gen. Simon Bolivar’s struggle against the Spanish Empire in the 1810s and ’20s through several dizzying cycles of battlefield victory, triumphal procession, demoralizing reversal, and squalid exile, before he finally drove imperial forces out of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. .. Arana’s dramatic narrative is appropriately grand and enthralling, if a tad breathless, and it makes Bolivar an apt embodiment of the ambitions and disappointments of the revolutionary age.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [A] human story of a wealthy Creole who, inspired by Enlightenment ideas, sought to bring South Americans of all colors responsible and representative government. As Arana aptly points out, his vision of equality went much further than the ideals of George Washington. Today, Bolivar is viewed either as the archetype of the Latin American strongman or an impossibly faultless crusader of equality. In her work, Arana adeptly finds the statesman behind the images. —Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Arana is an indefatigable researcher, a perceptive historian, and a luminous writer, as shown in her defining, exhilarating biography of the great South American liberator Simon Bolivar.... Her understanding of the man behind the fame—and behind the hostility that enveloped him in his later years—brings this biography to the heights of the art and craft of life-writing.
Booklist
Inspired biography of the great Latin American revolutionary, with great depth given to his fulsome ideas.... Arana's work is bold and positively starry-eyed about her subject. She....reconstructs the wildly erratic, early character development that led to...a career forged by his own will.... Bolivar embraced revolution wholeheartedly, declaring freedom for Spanish-American slaves, proclaiming war to the death and ruling by an authoritative style that won many detractors. Arana ably captures the brash brilliance of this revered and vilified leader.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.