Writing in the Dark or Quiet Strength

Writing in the Dark: Essays

Author: David Grossman

Recent essays on Israel, literature, and language from one of the country's most respected and best-loved voices Throughout his career, David Grossman has been a voice for peace and reconciliation between Israel and its Arab citizens and neighbors. In six new essays on politics and culture in Israel today, he addresses the conscience of a country that has lost faith in its leaders and its ideals. This collection includes an already famous speech concerning the disastrous Second Lebanon War of 2006, the war that took the life of Grossman’s twenty-year-old son, Uri.  Moving, humane, clear-sighted, and courageous, touching on literature and artistic creation as well as politics and philosophy, these writings are a cri de coeur from a heroic voice of reason at a time of uncertainty and despair. 

Publishers Weekly

Peace activist and vocal advocate for "relinquishing the Territories and ending the Occupation," Israeli novelist Grossman is unafraid of controversy; these six essays, however, address these concerns more obliquely, through the lens of literature. "Books That Have Read Me" merges the young reader's discovery that "books are the place in the world where both the thing and the loss of it can be contained" with the older writer's urge "to describe contemporary political reality in a language that is not the public, general, nationalized idiom." Grossman's passions are two-an Israel at peace with its neighbors and a citizenry restored to dignity through the individual language of literature, which "can bring us together with the fate of those who are distant and foreign." Grossman lays claim to an "acquired naïveté" in his hopefulness; how welcome and enlightening it is. (Oct.)

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David Keymer - Library Journal

Reflecting on the historical trauma that preceded the birth of his young country and conditioned its citizens' response to subsequent threats, Israeli novelist and essayist Grossman writes of his childhood in the 1950s: "In my neighborhood, people screamed every night from their nightmares." Besides being powerful imagery, that quote explains the environment in which Grossman operates. This slim book may seem limited in its appeal-four essays are on writing fiction in Israel, two on the need for peace with Israel's neighbors-but Grossman's ruminations are pertinent to us all. What can the fiction writer offer us in a world under continual siege, where external threat deadens our response to others' suffering and we dehumanize our enemies to make it easier to deal with them? Fiction writers, argues Grossman, have the rare opportunity to see other people as people, resisting the impulse to demonize them. "To write about the enemy means, primarily, to think about the enemy...even if he [the writer] is absolutely convinced of his own justness and the enemy's malice and cruelty." These essays are all worth reading, but the four on writing are exceptional. This heartfelt book, with a lasting impact, is enthusiastically recommended for larger general collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/15/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Israeli novelist Grossman (Her Body Knows, 2005, etc.) muses about authors who have influenced him and about the difficulties of living and writing in one of the world's most dangerous places. In these six slender essays, most originally delivered as speeches, the author discusses his passionate belief in the redemptive powers of literature. Grossman recalls reading Sholem Aleichem at his father's urging when he was a boy, then later realizing that the people he read about in those tales were the sorts of people who had died in the Holocaust. He alludes to other literary mentors-Kafka, Mann, Boll, Woolf-and writes amusingly about the influence of Bruno Schulz, whom he'd not read until a reader informed him that his work sounded like Schulz's. He writes compellingly of "the Other," examining our fear of those who are not like us and the analogous fear of the "others" who dwell inside us, whom we struggle to control. Grossman, who lost a son in military action in Lebanon, reveals the ability to view the world from perspectives other than his own; he tries to enter the minds of, say, Palestinians, just as he attempts to inhabit the lives of his fictional characters. Until people have hope in a peaceful future, he declares, chaos continues and powerful leaders easily control us by frightening us and appealing to the worst aspects of our nature. Living in fear and hopelessness leads to "a shrinking of our soul's surface," he writes, and fear constricts not just the political landscape but language itself. Grossman ponders the metaphor of Israel's borders, which have shifted continually since the nation's birth. Repeatedly, he yearns for a time when stability replaces fragility and hopetriumphs over fear. His final piece blasts the current Israeli leadership for exacerbating conditions in the region. Affecting essays that emphasize our common humanity.

Table of Contents:

Books That Have Read Me 3

The Desire to Be Gisella 29

Writing in the Dark 59

Individual Language and Mass Language 69

Contemplations on Peace 87

Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Rally 121

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Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation

Author: Rosa Parks

On June 15, 1999, Mrs. Rosa Parks was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor -- a tribute to the power of one solitary woman to influence the soul of a nation. But awards and influence were far from her mind when, on December 1, 1955, she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was not trying to start a movement. She was simply tired of social injustice and did not think a woman should be forced to stand so that a man could sit down. Yet her simple act of courage set in motion a chain of events that changed forever the landscape of American race relations. Quiet Strength celebrates the principles and convictions that have guided her through a remarkable life. It is a printed record of her legacy -- her lasting message to a world still struggling to live in harmony.

War and Decision or Brown Tide Rising

War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism

Author: Douglas J Feith

Of all the players in the planning and evolution of the Bush Administration's war on terrorism, few were more integral -- or more controversial -- than Douglas Feith, the chief strategist on Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon policy team. A highly influential international policy analyst for more than a quarter century before joining the Bush Administration in 2001, Feith worked closely with Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Cheney, and President Bush in defining the U.S. response to the attacks of 9/11 -- from the successful war on Afghanistan to the more challenging invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

Now, in this candid and revealing memoir, Feith -- a founding member of the "neoconservative" movement and an architect of the administration's preventive strategy in the war on terrorism -- offers the most in-depth and authoritative account yet of the Pentagon's evolving stance during one of the most controversial eras of American history. Drawing upon a unique trove of documents and records, this extraordinary chronicle will put the reader in the room for scores of previously unreported senior-level meetings, showing how hundreds of critical decisions were made in defense of American interests during and after the crisis of 9/11 -- decisions both successful and controversial. Where journalists like Bob Woodward could only speculate, Feith is the first inside player to reveal the inner workings of the Pentagon, at a time when history hung in the balance.

As the political battles over Iraq and the Bush administration surge onward, one thing has been missing: A fair and accurate assessment of how the battles were joined, from inside the team that planned them. With this exceptional work of history, Douglas Feith contributes the only thing that can change the course of the debate: the truth.

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Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse

Author: Otto Santa Ana

"...awash under a brown tide...the relentless flow of immigrants..like waves on a beach, these human flows are remaking the face of America...." Since 1993, metaphorical language such as this has permeated mainstream media reporting on the United States' growing Latino population. In this groundbreaking book, Otto Santa Ana argues that far from being mere figures of speech, such metaphors produce and sustain negative public perceptions of the Latino community and its place in American society, precluding the view that Latinos are vested with the same rights and privileges as other citizens.

Applying the insights of cognitive metaphor theory to an extensive natural language data set drawn from hundreds of articles in the Los Angeles Times and other media, Santa Ana reveals how metaphorical language portrays Latinos as invaders, outsiders, burdens, parasites, diseases, animals, and weeds. He convincingly demonstrates that three anti-Latino referenda passed in California because of such imagery, particularly the infamous anti-immigrant measure, Proposition 187. Santa Ana illustrates how Proposition 209 organizers broadcast compelling new metaphors about racism to persuade an electorate that had previously supported affirmative action to ban it. He also shows how Proposition 227 supporters used antiquated metaphors for learning, school, and language to blame Latino children's speech—rather than gross structural inequity—for their schools' failure to educate them. Santa Ana concludes by calling for the creation of insurgent metaphors to contest oppressive U.S. public discourse about minority communities.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Preface
	Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	Why Study the Public Discourse Metaphors Depicting Latinos?	1
Pt. I	Theory and Method	13
Ch. 2	How Metaphor Shapes Public Opinion	15
Pt. II	Analyses	63
Ch. 3	Proposition 187: Misrepresenting Immigrants and Immigration	65
Ch. 4	Proposition 209: Competing Metaphors for RACISM and AFFIRMATIVE ACTION	104
Ch. 5	Student as Means, Not End: Contemporary American Discourse on Education	156
Ch. 6	American Discourse on NATION and LANGUAGE: The "English for the Children" Referendum	197
Pt. III	Conclusions	251
Ch. 7	DISEASE or INTRUDER: Metaphors Constructing the Place of Latinos in the United States	253
Ch. 8	Insurgent Metaphors: Contesting the Conventional Representations of Latinos	295
App	Tallies of Political Metaphors	321
	Notes	333
	References	365
	Permissions Acknowledgments	393
	Index	395

For Freedoms Sake or Chicano Art

For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer

Author: Chana Kai Le

In this intimate biography, Chana Kai Lee documents Hamer's lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action, her rise to national prominence as a civil rights activist, and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-sufficiency for blacks in the segregated South.. "Offering a complex understanding of how racism, sexism, violence, and economic injustice intersected to spur the civil rights movement and to shape, and sometimes restrict, the role of women and poor people within it, Lee illuminates the abiding links between political activism and economic transformation.. "The definitive biography of one of the most important civil rights activists of the twentieth century, For Freedom's Sake is also a moving social history of a critical epoch in American history.

Publishers Weekly

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer garnered the national spotlight when she and other members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party attempted to unseat the entirely white official Mississippi delegation. Though the coup failed, and Hamer herself earned the wrath of Lyndon Johnson, she helped draw attention to the ways in which black Southerners were denied political power. At the time, Hamer had only been involved in the civil rights movement for two years; at the age of 47 she reemerged as a natural and vibrant leader who would go on to run (unsuccessfully) for the Mississippi State Senate. Lee's biography is less committed to exploring Hamer's personal life than to charting her growth as an activist and examining the profound impact of gender, sexuality, violence and poverty on the early civil rights movement. By focusing on these issues in Hamer's own life--the repeated rapes her grandmother endured, resulting in 20 illegitimate children, Hamer's own involuntary sterilization and the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of the police--the book highlights the vantage point of African-American women in the fight for basic human rights in the South. Lee handles this difficult material sensitively, placing it in context of the economic and social complexities of Southern life. Never sentimentalizing her subject, Lee honestly discusses the movement's bitter internal struggles, Hamer's severe bouts with depression and her strong disagreements with white feminists. This biography vividly brings to light a crucial aspect of the civil rights movement that until now has not been given its due. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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Chicano Art: Inside/Outside the Master's House: Cultural Politics and the Cara Exhibition

Author: Alicia Gaspar de Alba

In the early 1990s, a major exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985 toured major museums around the United States. As a first attempt to define and represent Chicano/a art for a national audience, the exhibit attracted both praise and controversy, while raising fundamental questions about the nature of multiculturalism in the U.S.

This book presents the first interdisciplinary cultural study of the CARA exhibit. Alicia Gaspar de Alba looks at the exhibit as a cultural text in which the Chicano/a community affirmed itself not as a "subculture" within the U.S. but as an "alter-Native" culture in opposition to the exclusionary and homogenizing practices of mainstream institutions. She also shows how the exhibit reflected the cultural and sexual politics of the Chicano Movement and how it serves as a model of Chicano/a popular culture more generally.

Drawing insights from cultural studies, feminist theory, anthropology, and semiotics, this book constitutes a wide-ranging analysis of Chicano/a art, popular culture, and mainstream cultural politics. It will appeal to a diverse audience in all of these fields.