A simple description of Tara Westover’s “Educated” would be that is a memoir of a childhood and young adult years in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. But it is much more than a chronological retelling of childhood memories based on contemporaneous diaries and journals saved through the years. It is a dissertation on family dysfunction, psychological damage, and the struggle for self-actualization in the face of great opposition.

Born in 1986, Tara Westover is one of seven children in a family dominated by a father with religious beliefs and a social philosophy that many would describe as fanatic. Averse to societal norms, he eked out a living salvaging scrap metal from a junkyard that he maintained on his property in the Idaho hills. He refused to send his children to school; they worked for him in the scrapyard instead, doing dangerous jobs that repeatedly resulted in severe injuries [never to be treated by the highly suspect “Medical Establishment.”]  He viewed women as secondary and required them to be subservient. Westover’s mother obeyed. She became an unlicensed, naturalist midwife and an herbal healer. Westover’s father became obsessed with the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, in which federal agents shot and killed Randy Weave’s family, and he lectured and preached to his family often about what he saw as the coming End of Days.

None of that sounds too bad—just highly unusual—until you factor in the harsh, unrelenting, physical and psychological abuse Tara suffered at the hands of her father, her loving but complicit mother, and especially her older brother, Shawn. Westover’s memoir chronicles all of it, in vivid and uncomfortable detail.

Becoming educated, as the title implies, is Westover’s way out. But that journey is extremely complicated for a young girl raised in a family that rejects public education, preaches the supremacy of scripture and Mormon doctrine over secular learning, and exerts enormous psychological pressure against Tara’s urge to learn beyond the limits imposed by her family. Her mother taught her to read, but that was the extent of her “home-schooling.” At 17, she managed to convince her family to let her enroll in Brigham Young University [a difficult process, because she had no high-school transcript and even lacked a birth certificate.] In her early classes, she discovered how far behind she was: Once, reading a passage aloud in class, she stumbled over the word “Holocaust,” and asked what it was. The professor thought she was joking and chastised her.

Her tenacity is remarkable—bordering on superhuman. Her academic intelligence impresses teachers, professors and peers, and she pursues higher studies, always opposed by her parents. Time and again, as her formal education moves from undergraduate to graduate to doctoral level, her family rejects her efforts and literally demonizes her—calling her possessed and evil. [Her parents, who never otherwise traveled, flew to England while she was studying at Cambridge, and stayed in her dorm room with her for a week, intending to “exorcise” her.]

Even as she begins to gain some geographical and psychological distance, and begins to be able to analyze and understand the dynamics of her family, she is constantly drawn back in, still craving their love, still wanting to belong, still stung by their ultimate rejection. And virtually every year, when she returns to her home in Buck’s Peak, Idaho, for Christmas, something happens that makes her want to flee, while at the same time feeling the need to stay.

“Educated” gave me an inside view of a world I knew little about, except through stereotypes of off-the-grid, fundamentalist Christian families. This memoir is not an indictment of Mormonism, survivalism, or religion in general. This is personal. Westover’s account includes many difficult memories, described in [often literally] painful detail. She is honest about her ambivalence, her academic insecurities, and her unending internal war between self-actualization and family loyalty. By the end of this engrossing memoir, she has educated herself—and more than just academically. She has paid a big price for her urge to learn. And while I sometimes had to force myself to read certain passages, and wanted to scream at her to not go home, to not get in the car with her brother, to tell someone what was happening to her, I couldn’t put it down. I just hope that Tara Westover has been able to use what she has learned to broker a peace with herself. Sharing her experiences with readers is an education itself.

The post Educated: A painful, honest memoir of family vs. self appeared first on Occasional Planet.

My experience recently at the “Lift Every Voice” concert at Powell Symphony Hall in St. Louis was much different than it would have been if I hadn’t just read Isabel Wilkerson’s amazing book —The Warmth of Other Suns — about what came to be called the Great Migration, the movement of over six million African Americans from southern states to points north and west between 1915 and 1970. Wilkerson interviewed over 1200 individuals and used the stories of three of them to illustrate in painstaking detail what life was like during the Jim Crow era for Americans who happened to be born with black or brown skin.

Most American history text books used in high school and for introductory college classes briefly mention the Jim Crow laws and might show a few photos of separate water fountains, rest rooms, etc. In fairness, textbooks that cover “Civil War to Present” as most do, must skim over a lot of material out of necessity.

I would like to think that our understanding of race relations in America would be much improved if Americans who did not experience the degradation of the Jim Crow South would read Wilkerson’s book. That may be naïve of me, but I know there must be millions of Americans like myself whose hearts are open to feeling the painful experiences of others.

I had to force myself to read some of the gruesome details related by the people Wilkerson interviewed. One story, about two young boys listening to a man being whipped to death in the woods, will haunt me the rest of my life. The man was screaming and begged his killers to let him pray before he died. They gave him one minute and then continued the whipping. The final words the boys overheard were “The sonabitch is dead.”

That was a story related to Wilkerson by Robert Joseph Pershing Foster who grew up in Louisiana. I will expand on his story, but the stories of Ida Mae Gladney of Mississippi and George Starling of Florida are equally compelling.

Monroe, Louisiana, 1933

Pershing Foster, son of the principal and a teacher at Monroe Colored High School, describes how he would escape the limitations of his world on the wrong side of the tracks by going to the movies. He remembers climbing the back stairs two, three, four, flights up and smell of urine surrounding him. The one toilet that blacks could use was usually out of order and was not a priority for the theater owner.

At the end of the school year, his father would borrow a pickup truck, take a few strong boys with him and drive to the high school for the white kids and load up whatever books, supplies, etc., that school was discarding. That’s how they got their educational materials.

Pershing described how he made a game of jumping the puddles that gathered after a heavy rain in the dirt roads on his side of town. Of course the whites had paved roads by the 1930’s, but there was never enough money to improve the roads the blacks had to use.  The boy blames those roads and lack of sidewalks for the fact he never had the chance to learn to roller skate. He told Wilkerson, “We could buy skates, but we couldn’t buy sidewalks.”

His father was paid half of what the principal at the white high school was paid despite having the same education and credentials. Salaries of public employees like teachers and principals were published without apology in the local paper. Never having more than barely enough to feed and clothe a family made it impossible for Pershing’s father to pass an inheritance on to his children.

Wilkerson explained that “The layers of accumulated assets built up by the better-paid dominant caste, generation after generation, would factor into a wealth disparity of white Americans having an average net worth ten times that of black Americans by the turn of the twenty-first century, dampening the economic prospects of the children and grandchildren of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration before they were even born.” P. 85

The colored school, where Pershing’s mother taught seventh grade, was a small brick building with 1,139 pupils and a teacher for each grade kindergarten through eleventh. When a fire broke out in the basement of the school and destroyed all the furniture and equipment they had, the city refused even to replace what was lost. The city leaders said they needed the money for the new building being constructed for the white students.

Pershing’s father had to raise the money among the students’ families to replace what he could. He didn’t want to dwell on the situation because “…it would have done them no good, but their very existence, their personal aspirations, and the purpose of their days were in direct opposition to white ruling-class policy on colored education—that is, that colored people needed no education to fulfill their God-given role in the South.” P. 86

As one southern woman told journalist Ray Stannard Baker,  “If these Negroes become doctors and merchants or buy their own farms, what shall we do for servants?”

Fortunately for Pershing, his parents were able to scrape up enough money to send him to Morehouse College in Atlanta where he graduated in spring of 1939 with a major in math and minor in biology. Despite his strong desire to leave the South, Pershing entered Meharry Medical College in Nashville after his mother’s earnest pleading.

Over time, he began using his first name and became a very successful medical doctor in Los Angeles, even becoming the personal physician to Ray Charles. Wilkerson interviewed him at his LA home which she described as a “grand home where he threw exuberant parties.”   But Robert Foster, MD, never felt he was accepted as an equal by the medical community.

I can’t help but include a personal story here. From 1966 to 1968, I lived at Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota where my husband served as a medical doctor. One of the dozen or so MD’s on base was an African American from Tennessee. He told us at a party one night about how he had gone into the City of Grand Forks to buy take-out chicken dinners for his family and had been treated very badly. At first, the employees wouldn’t wait on him at all. Finally they relented just to get him out of the store. When he got home, he opened the food buckets and found only scraps and bones. Some of us who heard that story were furious and wanted to picket the store in town. But the good doctor didn’t want to cause any more trouble for the Air Force since the base was fairly new and there was a lot of resentment about black service members coming to town.  To this day, I can still get my hackles up when I think of how our friend was treated just because of the color of his skin.

As I said, after reading The Warmth of Other Suns ,  my experience at the “Lift Every Voice” concert was much different than it would have been otherwise. Although everyone obviously thoroughly enjoyed the amazing IN UNISON chorus and the always extraordinary St. Louis Symphony, I had to wonder how different the experience must have been for those whose family members lived through the period of southern apartheid.  Do they feel, as Robert Foster MD did in Los Angeles, that they will never be fully accepted as equal in status by white America?  I don’t know.

I do know that there will be a program on PBS tomorrow night called “The Talk—Race in America.”  Previews describe how black parents have to warn their children, especially their sons, how to obey to a point of subservience any law enforcement officers who approach them.  Of course, ALL parents warn their teenagers about safe driving habits, etc., but I don’t remember having to tell my children when they were learning to drive that, if stopped by a police officer, to be sure to keep their hands on the steering wheel in plain sight.

When I look closely at the Americans who roar approval at Donald Trump’s rallies,  I see more than just anger and frustration about the lack of economic progress being made by working class families over the past few decades. We should all be angry about the huge gap between the majority of Americans and the tiny minority who control most of the wealth in our country. But I also see in the faces of those Trump supporters an anger and bitterness that has less to do with income levels and more to do with the need to have a class of people to look down on. For a further understanding of the history of the American caste system, I highly recommend  White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg.

For my part, this search for understanding of race relations in America will continue through reading, talking to others, spending more time with my African American friends and watching educational programs on television.  I always thought the problems of race relations had nothing to do with me because I am second generation immigrant on my father’s side and third generation on my mother’s side. None of my ancestors owned slaves, so I must be exempt from caring about the plight of the blacks in my country. MY country?  That reveals a sense of ownership, doesn’t it.  I wonder how my African American friends feel about their place in our society?  Dare I ask?

My grandfather emigrated from England and walked into a good job at a textile mill in central New York State… a mill where blacks couldn’t even apply for work. That’s “white privilege” and I have to own that.  When I hear “Black Lives Matter” now, I think I understand just a little bit more than I did a month ago.

Never too old to learn.

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In a recent Occasional Planet post, Susan Cunningham writes:

“We can blame the NRA all we want, but the enemy, as Pogo said, is ourselves. We are a violent society and always have been. From the European invasion and occupation of the Americas 500 years ago to the “war on terror” around the world today, we must love violence or we would stop it.”

Just as so many people in the United States are fixated on violence, many of us are also addicted to corruption and deceit. We often try to deny it, but our lifestyle patterns clearly indicate that this is what we do. Self-dealing and cover-up by the federal government is the basic theme of Sharyl Attkisson’s new book, Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.

It is important to note that quite a few Americans, perhaps a majority, are not prone to violence. They prefer to live their lives peacefully and to solve conflicts in a non-violent way. Similarly, most Americans are basically honest and prefer to play by the rules. However, there are enough Americans who prefer to twist the rules and bend the truth to make it an endemic problem rather than an occasional act of malfeasance. That is the essential problem with Attkisson’s book. She is a former national correspondent for CBS News who, in recent years, was doing a considerable amount of investigative journalism. Regrettably for her, CBS became less and less interested in her stories to the point where in early 2014 she decided to leave “Black Rock” and avoid the harassment of editors and supervisors.

Her investigations cover a wide span of issues, from gun-running to drug dealers in Mexico, to Benghazi, to the initial fiasco of electric cars in the United States. Though her reporting is far more sophisticated and refined than local news, much of what she presents seems to be of the “you won’t believe what I found” variety. She tries to be fair in her bashing; including the George W. Bush Administration; the Obama Administration; corporate moguls; labor unions. However, because most of her frustration emanated from what she saw as the resistance of corporate CBS to run stories critical of agencies within and actions by the Obama administration, most of what she reports is criticism of the current administration.

My problem with her bashing of the Obama Administration is that she seems to be totally blind to the concept of “shit happens.” Yes, the Obama Administration did not do a good job of rolling out the web site for the Affordable Care Act, and the Justice Department seems to have engaged in unwarranted surveillance of the Associated Press. Bluntly, it’s true that “mistakes were made,” putting the actions in the passive voice, as is commonly done. But this is what happens when we have a body politic in which it comes so naturally for so many people to engage in and accept corruption.

There are two particular problems and one opportunity that occurs when the focus is put on a semi-progressive administration like the Obama one. The problems are (a) In many regards, the Obama Administration is trying to serve the needs of the people, something that sets them apart from Republicans, and (b) Republican outlets such as Rush Limbaugh or Fox News will jump all over any malfeasance on the part of a Democratic Administration without any understanding of how malfeasance is just part of who we are. The opportunity that arises from Attkisson’s reporting on the Obama Administration is that in many cases (such as with the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act) there is an intense desire of individuals and agencies within the Administration to correct the errors. Indeed, this is what has happened in the past fifteen months since the initial roll-out of the ACA. We must keep in mind that the administration is dealing with a highly imperfect law, which, in many ways was shredded by (a) Republican opposition to addressing the health care needs of the more than forty million Americans who did not have health insurance, and (b) the timidity of the Obama Administration to pursue a Medicare-for-All program that would have eliminated many of the structural problems with the law, including minimal ability to contain costs.

Attkisson operates from the perspective of a journalist who feels that the primary principle that should exist in our society is freedom of the press. Yes, the concept is a virtue and is deeply embedded in our First Amendment. But when it comes to the well-being of the American people, freedom of the press is somewhat of a neutral principle. In itself, it does not improve or damage the quality of life that we all enjoy, particularly those who are most in need of an emphasis on justice and fairness. With all its flaws, the Obama Administration has a greater commitment to the well-being of all Americans than Republicans do. Attkisson’s reporting and writing does an excellent job of pointing out missteps by the Administration. As much as I appreciate her investigatory work, I think that it does not necessarily make us a better country. We need to combine her research and presentation with a further commitment to the principles of a progressive agenda.

The post Sharyl Attkisson book measures Obama and U.S. against a false standard appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I am reading James Risen’s latest book on how the military-industrial complex has morphed into the military-homeland security-intelligence complex. Risen is a New York Times reporter and has been interviewing primary sources involved with America’s “war on terror” starting with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You have all heard about the cargo planes loaded with cash that landed in Baghdad right after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Risen gives all the details right down to how many pallets of each denomination of bills went missing.

Folks, we are screwed. I’ve tried to find a silver lining for years and truly believed the American people would wake up and demand an accounting. NOT going to happen. Half of the latest budget bill passed by Congress and signed by President Obama is going to the “defense” industry. Read Risen’s book, Pay Any Price, to find out how incompetent the agencies are that manage those billions and billions of dollars. Risen tells of one con artist who convinced the CIA that he had invented special computer software that could decipher hidden messages in Al Jazeera television news reports. It was a total fabrication, the CIA found out, hushed it up out of embarrassment, and the con guy went over to another agency and got a contract for the same nonsense.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human nature being what it is, no one wants to publicize stupid mistakes. So con artists can go from one agency to another and bring a big truck to haul away the money. E.g., the two supposed interrogation experts who were paid millions to devise new ways to torture prisoners. Thankfully, Sen. Dianne Feinstein had the guts to continue the investigation into our torture program and release a report. These are the kinds of reports, along with first account interviews by reporters like Risen, that will become the research materials for future historians.

We can blame the NRA all we want, but the enemy, as Pogo said, is ourselves. We are a violent society and always have been. From the European invasion and occupation of the Americas 500 years ago to the “war on terror” around the world today, we must love violence or we would stop it.

I took this quote from a novel by Joyce Carol Oates recently. A young woman is thinking about what happened to a dear friend wounded and disfigured during fighting in Iraq.

It came to her then: the wars were monstrous, and made monsters of those who waged them. The Iraq war, the Afghanistan war. In time, civilians too would become monsters, for this is the nature of war.

The post America loves war appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of my favorite essays of all time comes from old-school conservative writer Whitaker Chambers. In the late 1950s he reviewed Ayn Rand’s thousand-page paperweight Atlas Shrugged, in a piece titled “Big Sister is Watching You”.

What is great about “Big Sister” is not that it hits Atlas Shrugged in most of its considerable weak spots, but that it also lays down a great critique of political novels:They frequently become a cliché Chambers describes as “The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness”, in which both sides are “operatic caricatures”.

So, too is Jack London’s The Iron Heel. Unfortunately, though, its heroes are leftists, as opposed to Rand’s flawless industrialists. What does this mean for today? I contend that the absolutism of this political novel is also reflected in America’s own ideological conversation.

Jack London is best known as the naturalist who wrote White Fang and The Call of the Wild, stories about men braving the wilderness, or animals succumbing to domestication. Little known is that he was a devoted leftist, an important member of the American Socialist Party. The Iron Heel, written in 1908 near the height of socialist power in the United States, is infused with this ethos, to the exclusion of all others. Interestingly, George Orwell was very much inspired by the novel, using it as an inspiration for1984.

Like his friend H.G. Wells, London takes a turn for the futuristic. The framing device of the story is a new edition of the Everhard Manuscript, a journal from the twentieth century: In London’s fictional chronology, three hundred years in the future, humanity finally overthrew the fascist Oligarchies and established a world socialist collective. In this utopia, scholars have uncovered the Everhard Manuscript, a journal written by Avis Everhard, a socialist revolutionary who fought the rise of the Oligarchy in the United States, from around 1912 to 1940. She is married to Ernest Everhard, who more or less leads the movement. The future scholars dispute Avis’s claim that Ernest was such a great man, but London still makes Ernest out to be as much of a Child of Light as Rand’s Jon Galt or Howard Roark: A hero with zero flaws.

Neither Avis nor Ernest nor anyone else in the novel emerges as interesting characters. Rather, I found two particularly interesting elements in The Iron Heel. The first is its rather accurate prediction of the rise of fascism.

Eleven years after The Iron Heel was written, Mussolini founded the world’s first fascist party, using the principles of nationalism, corporatism, and centralized authority. These principles are very close to the Oligarchy of London’s novel. As the fictional chronology progresses, the evil capitalists of the United States band together, stifle the nation’s representation, and establish a dystopia in which the majority of Americans live in horrific poverty. These conditions mirror those in real-life fascist Germany, Japan, Italy, and Spain in a very accurate way.

The second clever aspect of The Iron Heel is the way in which moral ambiguity is developed toward the end of the novel. Avis admits that the socialists did not predict the sincerity of the Oligarchs: After the initial cynicism of the corporations, a new generation emerged that believed that the Oligarchy was the only thing preventing a horrible socialist revolution that would devour all joyous things in the world. This was the justification for fascism; it is also the justification for our contemporary far right, who think that any attempt at economic reform is more or less communism.

The ending of the novel describes the Chicago Commune, a revolt in that city based on the real-life Paris Commune uprising in 1871. The socialists revolt, the armies of the Oligarchy put it down, and Avis witnesses the absolute misery of the poor, then called “the people of the abyss”. At this point they are mostly illiterate, barbaric, and animalistic. The message is clear: If you make the people so poor as to become animals, then they will act as such.

Still, these good points don’t disperse the main criticism I have with the novel: It is still a story of the Children of Light fighting the Children of Darkness. London does take time to identify some morally ambiguous characters: The “Frisco Reds” are a splinter group from the socialists who commit violent and useless terrorism; The big unions defect from the cause and become a “labor aristocracy” aligned with the Oligarchs; and a Bishop changes from an oblivious theologian to a sympathetic champion of the poor. This is more in line with how things work in real life: various factions contend for supremacy for their ideas and personnel. We may be disgusted with the fascism portrayed in the book (and its similarities to modern-day American corporatism), but more often than not I believe it is harmful to look at things in a simple good vs. evil narrative.

And that’s what The Iron Heel comes down to, really: The good guys beat the bad guys. These absolutist dichotomies are very much alive in modern American ideology: the greedy poor and the dignified rich; the heroic Americans and the cowardly terrorists; the white oppressors and the black victims; the evil Israelis and the downtrodden Palestinians. So long as we view things in this light, our literature, and our intelligentsia as a whole, will not provide constructive or realistic solutions to our problems.

The post Absolutism in political novels and in political reality: The Iron Heel appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’ve just read–two years after everyone else–Katherine Boo’s powerful book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. It won the 2012 National Book Award, and a blurb on the back cover of the just-released softcover edition says, “Reported like Watergate and written like Great Expectations.”  I usually ignore those blurbs, but in this case, it’s an extremely apt summary.

Boo goes–literally–behind the scenes in the Annawadi slum of Mumbai, India–a jumbled, filthy and impoverished area hidden from the view of westerners and better-off Indian citizens by concrete walls built to “protect” Mumbai’s airport and its adjacent luxury hotels. [The title of the book refers to a series of billboard ads plastered, end-to-end, onto the concrete barrier. The ads promote high-priced, designer floor tiles that promise to be “BEAUTIFUL FOREVER  BEAUTIFUL FOREVER  BEAUTIFUL FOREVER”]

Boo’s reporting centers on a few of Annawadi’s residents: 17-year-old Abdul–who sorts  trash picked up by others and sells it by the pound to recyclers; Asha, a striving, 40-year-old whose ambition is to rise above the squalor of Annawadi, which she accomplishes, bit by bit, by becoming a local fixer by day and a call girl by night. Manju and Meena, 15-year-old girls whose futures are dictated by the social norms of arranged marriages; Fatima, viciously beaten by her husband, berated by society for a birth defect that left her one-legged–her out-of-control, self-destructive rage created havoc in her small corner of the slum; and Sunil, Sonu, Kalu and other teenagers and adults who survive by scavenging the enormous, rat-infested garbage dump and sewage lake around which the Annawadi slum has grown.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers offers an intimate, unvarnished look at a life that is simply unimaginable to someone like me. As you turn the pages, you get to know people in Annawadi who subsist on pennies per day and spend hours standing in line for the trickle of water provided at sporadic times at public spigots. You see them striving to become what they describe as “first-class” people, desperately trying to decipher the behavioral codes that they believe could open the doors to a better life. They are ignored by their government, they are invisible to the rich people who fly into and out of the airport whose throwaways are Annawadi’s life blood, and they are brutalized by a legal system that is violent and corrupt at every level. They are helpless against a social system that expects bribes for the most basic services. And the shrewdest among them victimize their own neighbors.

It’s terribly disheartening, so much so that suicide–by ingesting rat poison, or by self-immolation–is too often perceived as the only way out, and Boo describes several examples among Annawadi residents she helps us get to know. Equally dispiriting are Boo’s detailed accounts of the many ways that government-funded programs and well-intentioned non-profits–whose purported goals are to help and offer hope to slum-dwellers–are routinely gamed by corrupt politicians and community members who skim and pocket funds for their own use.

In a passage toward the end of the book, Boo laments the poverty and  powerlessness of the people who live in Annawadi. Her analysis of the vicious cycle that rules their lives is a sad commentary–not just on the lives of Annawadi’s citizens, but also on the lives of impoverished and politically marginalized people everywhere:

The slumdwellers rarely got mad together…Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes, they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes…they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate…they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.

What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

The post Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Poverty & powerlessness, up close and personal appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’d almost forgotten about the three friends who, while hiking in Kurdistan in 2009, were lured across the Iraq/Iran border and then held prisoner in an Iranian jail for two years. Then I saw a short interview with them on MSNBC and learned that they had just published a book about their experience. In the interview, they seemed so articulate and appealing that I immediately downloaded their book.

I was hooked from the first page and almost didn’t breathe until I finished it two days later.

In A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran, Sara Shourd, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer take turns telling their story, a detailed, first-person account of a trip down the rabbit hole of the Iranian judicial system. Their memories are vivid and detailed. They recall, with amazing clarity, how they were wrongfully arrested and how their initial imprisonment proceeded, day-by-day into an inexorable descent into long-term captivity. It’s so personal, evocative and honest that you can almost feel yourself there, in Evin Prison, alongside them as they navigate their feelings, learn how to operate in the bizarr-o world of the Iranian system and sustain each other.

As they rotate the role of narrator, Sara, Josh and Sean each give an astonishingly thorough and personally revealing account of what was going through their minds at each stage of their imprisonment.

They tell their stories matter-of-factly, in a situation where the facts of their lives are both terrifying and unpredictable, and where the facts that lead to their imprisonment are not regarded as facts at all by the Iranian judicial system. They are accused of spying for the CIA, for the State Department, for Israel. Their innocent life histories—as students, activists, journalists, teachers and travelers—are twisted by Iranian authorities into evidence to be used against them. They are lied to about the duration of their imprisonment, psychologically manipulated by prison guards and supervisors, allowed extremely limited contact with their families, and never get to talk with their Iranian-government-appointed lawyer.

Through all of it, they maintain their sanity and dignity by mining every resource they brought with them: intelligence, intuitiveness, political savvy and an impressive internal encyclopedia of literature, poetry, music, and history. They recite poems from memory, [Wordsworth!], devise coded messages, teach each other new languages, dance, sing, exercise, defy their guards, wangle privileges, and use hunger strikes to manipulate the system. They keep secret diaries. At one point, to keep their minds from rotting, Josh and Sean create a secret timeline of world history, adding dates that they glean from the random books they manage to get from their captors. Their story is one of resilience, tenacity and incredible optimism in the most trying of circumstances.

Each narrator describes—often painfully—the ups and downs of their feelings and the ever-shifting complexities of their relationships. Sara and Shane entered captivity as a couple, and they go to extraordinary lengths—in extremely limited circumstances—to comfort each other, stay in communication and keep their relationship intact. Josh is their very close friend. How the three of them work to sustain each other—even when the triangle threatens to fracture—is an inspiring story of true friendship and caring under duress. As I read their stories, step by step, I worried alongside them about whether, in the end, they would be able to keep their relationships together.

Solitary confinement is a central issue in their stories. Though Shane and Josh started out in solitary, they were eventually reunited and spent most of their 26 months in a shared cell. Sara was alone the entire time and suffered greatly from the isolation. [She was released after a year.] None of the three was tortured in the traditional meaning of the word, or even in the manner falsely dubbed as “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the Bush administration. In the book, they speculate that they were spared—while others in the same prison were not—because they were regarded as “high-value” prisoners [meaning Americans who could be used as bargaining chips]. Sara, who endured solitary the longest—presumably because of her gender—essentially calls solitary a kind of de facto torture, because of the psychological damage it inflicts.  An extremely insightful and articulate writer, more than once, she reflects on the effect that solitary confinement is having on her—and on how it must affect others similarly.

As Shane writes: “Solitary confinement is not a head banging against the wall in terror or rage. Sometimes it is, but mostly it’s just the slow erasure of who you thought you were. You think you are still you, but you have no real way of knowing. How can you know if you have no one to reflect you back to yourself.”

Fittingly, after her release, Sara became an editor at Solitary Watch and focuses her human-rights advocacy efforts on combating the widespread use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails.

A Sliver of Light, as those who followed the story know, has a relatively happy ending, for a story that never should have happened. Sara, Shane and Josh’s release was achieved primarily as the result of an intense, tireless “Free the Hikers” campaign led by the hostages’ family and friends, and by Sara after her release, and enabled by the savvy, humanitarian diplomacy of the King of Oman and the Swiss government. Sara’s chronicle of official efforts to free the hikers does not put the U.S. State Department in a particularly positive light.

A Sliver of Light is a powerful memoir, so detailed and so honest that I sometimes wanted to turn away, to pretend that this couldn’t happen to such smart, likeable, caring people. But I couldn’t. The book rips off your blindfold. After reading their story—and experiencing the openness of their narration—my admiration for Sara, Josh and Shane, and for their families, is enormous. As you close the book, you’ll be asking yourself if, in a similarly unimaginable and unjust situation, you could come anywhere close to what they did.

The post A Sliver of Light: Hiker hostages tell their story in an amazing new book appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Recently the American people were treated to a moment of sweet absurdity on the floor of the United States Senate.  You know what I’m talking about.  It was that historic moment at 8:06 pm on September 24, 2013, that will live forever in our collective imagination. It was a moment that will prompt Americans in years to come to ask one another, “Where were you when . . .?”

It was a time when Americans across the continent rushed to pick up their remotes to change the channel, asking themselves, “ Is this C-SPAN or Comedy Central?”

How can any of us ever forget those precious, never-to-be-forgotten moments when Senator Ted Cruz went all squishy as he interrupted his non-filibuster filibuster of the healthcare law to read a bedtime story to his daughters? (Will any parent who witnessed Cruz’s stunt ever be able to read “Green Eggs and Ham” with a straight face again?)

In the interest of extending such delicious farce a little longer, here is a list of children’s books that might interest other politicians who might wake up one morning, look in the bathroom mirror, and think to themselves, “Gee, maybe it’s my turn to debase the serious work of the government.  Why should Teddy be allowed to play all by himself?” So, here are suggestions for some of our favorite and not-so-favorite politicians because, who knows, Teddy might have started a trend.

Mitch McConnell.  Start rehearsing “Yurtle the Turtle.”

Rand Paul. “Chicken Little” clucking “the sky is falling” will supply you with a new delusion after you’ve run out of your own.

John Boehner. Sorry, just take a glance in the mirror and then pick up “Color Me Orange.”

Paul Ryan. If being the empty vessel of the 2012 election wasn’t enough for you,  why not just remind us again and read “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?

Michele Bachmann. Just give it your best witch impression and lash into “Hansel and Gretel.”

Sarah Palin.  Please, spare us our national embarrassment. Stay home. Stand in front of your full-length mirror, gaze adoringly at yourself, and read “Gertrude McFuzz” to the image in the glass.

Elizabeth Warren. Let those financial bigwigs know that you’ll never give up just like the brave and plucky character in “Brave Irene.”

Bernie Sanders. How about castigating those who play the discrimination game and insist they sit through “The Sneetches” from first page to last?

Nancy Pelosi. Blast those Republicans out of the chamber with “Horton Hatches the Egg.”  They’ll know what you’re talking about when you get to the part where Horton declares, “I meant what I said and I said what I meant, And an elephant’s (editor’s note: donkey’s) faithful, one hundred percent!”

Barack Obama. Why should Congress have all the fun? Leave the teleprompter in the White House. Then pick up a copy of the story of the wily and intelligent dentist of “Doctor De Soto” and his nemesis, the hungry fox. (No secret code here. We all know which party wants to swallow you whole!)

The post Read me another: Children’s literature for politicians appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’ve been listening to Barbara Kingsolver read her new novel, Flight Behavior, on my car CD player, and I have to wonder what the other drivers must think of me as I shake my head and talk to myself.  Of course there are lots of people with those little earpieces talking to themselves nowadays, so they probably assume I’m up to speed technologically.

My head shaking isn’t negative.  Quite the contrary.  I can’t help exclaiming, “Damn, she’s good.”   Or just “Wow.” The woman is master of the metaphor and sneaks them in so slyly that they flit on by like the butterflies in the story.

Kingsolver tells stories about the universal lessons of life forms, human and otherwise. Some take flight out of necessity and others because they can’t necessarily adapt to their physical and emotional surroundings.  In this story, a young mother in the mountains of eastern Tennessee has an epiphany of sorts because she forgot to bring her glasses with her on a walk up a hill.  When she sees millions of Monarch butterflies on an adjacent hill doing what butterflies do during roosting season, she thinks it’s a message from either god or her mother-in-law. The vision is so powerful that she changes her mind about committing adultery in an old cabin hidden among the trees and goes back home.

The story wraps itself around the question about why millions of Monarch butterflies chose to roost in eastern Tennessee, rather than their natural habitat in Mexico. The reader learns just about everything there is to know about Monarch butterflies, without being force fed a whole semester of entomology.  Anyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock for 30 years knows the moral of the story is going to be about climate change.

On one of my errand runs recently, I passed a little church on a country road and read on its message board: “Judgment Day is Coming.”  Yes it is. But we’re not going to line up before St. Peter. We’re going to face each other down over the dwindling supply of natural resources and see who is fit to survive. When wheat won’t grow in the breadbaskets of the planet anymore, how will we adapt? When superstorms aren’t “super” any more, can we afford to rebuild over and over?

Climate scientists tell us the average temperature on Earth has already risen two degrees. The National Geographic Society offers a DVD called “Six Degrees Could Change the World” where the viewer sees, by way of some very clever photographic tricks, what parts of the world will look like when the temperature has risen by four degrees, five degrees and then six degrees. Lower Manhattan will flood just like it did recently during Superstorm Sandy. Only this time, the water won’t recede. Islands in the South Pacific are already disappearing. Well, not really disappearing, just not visible above water. California and Florida have already lost expanses of beaches, as the ocean laps up against the pitiful piles of rocks meant to keep it away. Meanwhile, the lack of rain and snow in the  Mississippi River watershed has closed the once “mighty” river to commercial traffic.

The butterflies found a resting place in eastern Tennessee despite the distinct possibility that their little bodies will freeze and die. But they couldn’t go home to Mexico because they would not survive there either.

When I finish listening to Kingsolver’s story sermon, I’ll let you know how it ends.  Or maybe the story isn’t really over.

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