Seeking to find Argentina’s disappeared children in film and book

Marjorie Agosin's book and The Official Story each tackle the Dirty War era in Argentina in which tens of thousands of people died.

How much do we allow ourselves to know?  What does it take to bring the truth out into public view?  What is the legacy of a period of random yet pervasive violence?

These are some of the key questions animating the film The Official Story and The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a book by dear friend and prolific author, poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin.

Oliver Sacks on Musicophilia

Oliver Sacks examines music and the brain in Musicophilia.

It’s been said many times that music is the universal language, yet it takes the unique combination of talents possessed by Oliver Sacks to show us some of its seemingly infinite variations.

In Musicophilia, his tenth book, Sacks brings his characteristic blend of literature, science, and correspondence with his patients and others to illuminate the different forms, meaning and neurological permutations music takes.

Bob Woodward on The Brethren

 

Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong take us inside the U.S. Supreme Court in The Brethren.

I’ve been on a Supreme Court reading kick recently, having read and enjoyed Joe Mathewson’s work on the “indispensable conflict” between the court and the press and Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel’s biography of legendary liberal justice William Brennan.

 

Part of the Brennan biography talked about the impact the publication of Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s The Brethren, which delivered on its promise to break the veil of secrecy surrounding the court’s deliberations.  While Brennan was not portrayed in nearly as unsympathetic light as Chief Justice Warren Burger, whose overtly political and heavy-handed actions repelled nearly all the other justices, the inclusion of several negative statements he made about the chief disturbed him.

Difference Maker William Brennan, Part II

Justice Brennan made a major impact on the nation during his 34 years on the Supreme Court.

This morning I finished Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel’s engaging biography of liberal champion William Brennan and felt a little sad when it ended.

I powered through the remaining 200 pages last night and earlier today, reading the authors’ description of Brennan’s efforts to hold back the increasingly conservative tide and direction of the nation’s highest court he served on for more than a third of a century.

Stern and Wermiel write about the discomfort the publication of Scott Armstrong and Bob Woodward’s The Brethren caused Brennan, who prided himself on maintaining positive relations with his colleagues and was mortified to read some of the derogatory statements he had made about then-Chief Justice Warren Burger published for the world to read.

Biography of Difference Maker William Brennan

Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel have written a fine biography of William Brennan.

Having your boss’ confidence can help you realize your individual objectives.

So can getting along with colleagues and a willingness to sacrifice rhetorical flourishes for more pedestrian prose.

And gains won in one era are by no means permanently ingrained in the nation’s fabric.

These are just some of the lessons I’ve learned thus far from Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel’s Justice Brennan, a highly enjoyable and richly researched biography of the late Supreme Court justice given to me by dear friend Evan Kaplan, one of my top book suppliers.

Difference Maker Shari Eppel’s poem about Libya

Shari Eppel has shared her poem about the recent brutality in Libya.

I’ve written before about Shari Eppel, a Zimbabwean human rights activist I met last November in Orvieto, Italy.  Shari has worked tirelessly the past 16 years to document, counter and stop the abuses of the Mugabe regime.

She’s also a poet.

Here is her latest, which she shared with other members of this year’s class of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma and gave me permission to post here.

LIBYA: 22 February 2011

Gadaffi furls and unfurls his umbrella

a giant albino bat’s wing

in the desert

where it never rains

but tonight

bombs hail down from the sky

shredding pale flesh to lace…

red tear drops splatter

on the desert’s face

in this frail fight for freedom

where people scream unheard into radio silence

and hospitals try to contain the pain.

Tell the world, the crying doctor implores,

he is killing the innocent –

we who want peace, only peace

and outside it storms, it storms

bullets thunder and flash

fires glow as buildings fall

-can you hear it, can you hear?

Ash blows, and bodies are laid below.

The madman flails his fists

rails at the ‘dogs’ of truth

declares his joy at being still here

where pain rains down

and the world can only gaze in awe

offering as little hope

as a white silk umbrella

to those who wring their hands at the skies.

 

SHARI EPPEL

Madison Protests Now and in 1967

David Maraniss' work covers another time in which Madison was in the world's spotlight.

With the nation locked in a seemingly interminable conflict in a far away land, the eyes of the world were on Madison, Wisconsin this week, where thousands of people descended on Wisconsin’s capital on Saturday.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were in the background to the protestors, who were contesting what they saw as an effort by Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature to impose draconian budget cuts and strip public sector employees of their collective bargaining rights.

Dear friend and Madison History professor Steve Kantrowitz told me yesterday that the sidewalks and streets around the capital building were packed with people expressing their opposition in nonviolent and peaceful fashion.  His exhilaration crackled across the line as he described the power of being among such a committed, disciplined and joyful crowd.

His children Elliot and Sophie were with him.

While it is unclear how much Sophie will remember of her initial protest, the odds are quite favorable that Elliot, who is approaching double digits, will have clear memories of Saturday’s sights, sounds and smells.

Of course, this is not the first time that the world spotlight has focused on Madison.

The university where Steve has taught since graduating from Princeton in 1995 was home to some of the most dramatic, early and disturbing confrontations between students registering their outrage at the Vietnam War and area police.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Madison native David Maraniss was an 18-year-old freshman at the time, and the indelible impression of observing the protests and feeling the sting of tear gas in October 1967 never left him.

Thirty four years later, he returned with his wife to their hometown to learn more about those events and that time.   He didn’t only focus on the domestic upheaval, though.  Rather he also investigated a bloody battle in Ong Nguyen, in which 58 American soldiers were killed.

The simultaneous occurrence of protest at home and war abroad form the dominant narrative threads of They Marched Into Sunlight, Maraniss’ impressive and often gripping evocation of a deeply troubled era in the nation’s history whose echoes still rebound today.

Learning over time from Difference Maker Joe Mathewson

Joe Mathewson's book about the Supreme Court provided layers of learning for me.

It is an unusual treat to learn from the same person over time.

I have had that privilege through a number of family relationships-Dunreith, my parents, my brothers, and Aidan top this list-and through several former teachers.

Marion Wright Edelman wrote in Lanterns about the role mentors have played at different parts of her life.   I enjoyed and wrote about that book in 2009, and I am writing here about the pleasure that comes both from maintaining a relationship over the course of years and, through conversation, interaction and reflection, having found different areas and subjects of learning than the one around which we first met.

As readers of this blog likely know, Paul Tamburello is atop this chart.   Since being in his fourth grade classroom more than 35 years ago, I have learned from Paul as an apprentice teacher from 1987 to 1989, as a physically vigorous person grappling with the debilitating Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a non-fatal cousin of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and as a fellow traveler on the road of life.

Dave Russell has been another man from whom I have learned much in the 20 years since we first met while waiting in the early January morning for a ferry to take us to Boston Harbor’s Thompson Island, where he was the teacher and I an instructional aide for special education students in Boston’s McKinley School.

In the ensuing two decades Dave has taught me about being a husband and a father and about approaching what can seem like a Sisyphean task with optimism, faith, and a relentless tenacity.

Medill lecturer Joe Mathewson is a third person from have I had the pleasure of absorbing different lessons over time.

Unrest in Wisconsin, help from Egypt and the Rebel Rank and File.

Rebel Rank and File brings out a hidden part of labor history and sheds light on this week's events in Madison, WI.

It’s been a wild and woolly week in Madison, Wisconsin, where public sector workers facing the elimination of their collective bargaining rights have protested, and, in the case of teachers, held several days of “sick outs.”

Labor opponents and supporters of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who has largely cast the labor rights issues in the context of budget cuts, have had their say, too. There were dueling rallies at the state’s capital earlier today.

It is no secret that the past few decades have not been kind to organized labor.  The ranks of unionized workers in the private sector has dipped into single digits from a high of about 35 percent, with public sector workers also seeing a drop in their ranks.

Rebel Rank and File, a collection of essays edited by Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner and Cal Winslow, a labor historian and father of one our interns at the Reporter, brings out the fact that the years from 1965 to 1981 saw an upsurge not just in strikes in general, but in wildcat actions taken by workers seeking to more directly influence their destiny.

Paul Johnson on Difference Maker Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Churchill is the subject of Paul Johnson's admiring book.

Of all the Britons of last century, Sir Winston Churchill’s star may have burned the brightest.

As Paul Johnson notes in his new book, Churchill, the man’s career as a politician spanned more than half a century, but was only one part of his varied activities and contributions to public life.