How Afghanistan Can Save Its Children

At least three people have been killed in a car bomb and gun attack on the office of NGO Save the Children https://t.co/pNkaEuR2pQ

— Al Jazeera News (@AJENews) January 24, 2018

An hour and a half earlier, the New York Times tweeted the following:

Save the Children suspended all of its operations in Afghanistan after gunmen stormed its office in Jalalabad. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack. https://t.co/k6KTfSMIzU

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 24, 2018

In the wake of the latest act of violence in Afghanistan to make major headlines in the United States, we asked contributors to the book Children of Afghanistan: The Path to Peace to comment on the impact of this tragic story in American news media, what conditions are actually like for children in Afghanistan, and how the country's own brain trust is working to take back the country after decades of war. 

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First we will hear from Wahid Omar, an Afghan political refugee who has worked in Afghanistan since 2001 in project development, implementation, and feasibility studies, and as an educational advisor for the United Nations Development Program. Wahid's contribution to Children of Afghanistan, an essay titled "The Parakeet Boys: Performing Education in the Streets of Kabul," is a salute to the street children of Afghanistan, who—through the art of performing classical poetry—preserve their cultural heritage but also improve their literacy skills in the absence of structured education. He dreams of developing "the Parakeet School" where street children could have the opportunity to use and train easily domesticated birds to earn income on the streets while at the same time receiving a formal education. Wahid returned from Afghanistan two months ago and is frustrated by the lack of improvement in early childhood education.

Education in a War Zone

Wahid Omar

Students recite prayers in a makeshift outdoor classroom in the Wakhan Corridor, a mountainous region in northeastern Afghanistan that extends to China and separates Tajikistan from India and Pakistan. Northeastern Afghanistan, September 2, 2007. (Photo courtesy of Getty Images, from Paula Bronstein's book Afghanistan.)

As I was walking toward a classroom full of children, I had the impression of watching a play. The entire four levels of the school had no windows, no walls; the classrooms could be seen from the outside. Pieces of metal and shattered glass were were the sad décor of the courtyard. I stopped in front of one classroom on the ground level and prepared my camera to take pictures. Inside, a teacher was questioning a child, who could not respond. Angrily, the teacher asked another child to slap the unresponsive one in the face. The teacher then asked again for the child to say the answer. This was Afghanistan in 2002 right after it was liberated from the Taliban.

With international aid pouring into the country, one would think that things might have changed dramatically for the better since then. Indeed, in the following years, millions of Afghan children gained access to schools, and parents began to see hope rising.

In 2017, fifteen years since I witnessed that scene in the classroom, my neighbor’s son was in primary school. He came back from school with a big bruise on his left eye and swelling hands. The Koran teacher had beaten him because he could not recite the holy book correctly. I decided to go to the school with my neighbor to file a complaint. When I entered the school, I saw that each teacher was walking with a stick, and the school director had a bat in his hand. It was a lost cause. In such situations, you wonder what happened to the millions of dollars spent by the international community on improving primary education.

The story of my neighbor’s son is a small symptom of much larger problems. Corruption, ghost teachers, outdated methods of teaching, lack of infrastructure, lack of quality teaching and credentialing, and poor leadership are all impediments toward a healthy system. Many children are dropping out because of poverty or unsafe conditions. Private schools are offering better education, at least on the surface. Nice uniforms and nice school minivans with the school logo are standard featurese in private schools, but the quality of teaching remains very poor. Private schools are only adding to the problem.

Many schools around the country, especially in eastern and southern Afghanistan, have closed because of insecurity and rising attacks by the Taliban. Thousands of boys and girls returned home with no hope to go back to school. The streets of Kabul are full of children begging for money or food. Many of them are becoming drug addicts, or are abused by employers, if they are lucky to find a job. In almost every shop in Afghanistan, there is a child apprentice who works under extremely poor conditions. Children are still abused physically and mentally.

Aid organizations are increasingly targets of terrorism, which does not improve the situation in any way. The recent attack in eastern Afghanistan against Save the Children is one example among many. For the Afghan people, hope is fading as the security situation has worsened in recent years. After three decades of wars and terrorism, how much longer can the Afghan people suffer?

It is certainly important to acknowledge that Afghans are fighting for progress and winning positive change. However, the truth is that overall conditions for children have not improved significantly. Significant progress has been made in higher education, but not in primary education. In fact, many donors have retracted their assistance to the Ministry of Education because of corruption. When the system is bad, children face the consequences the most.

A girl looks through the frosted window of a restaurant, hoping to get leftovers. She begs after school to help out her family. Kabul, January 13, 2002. (Photo courtesy of Getty Images, from Paula Bronstein's book Afghanistan.)

Next we hear from Esther Hyneman, whose chapter in Children of Afghanistan is titled, “Children Who Live with Their Mothers in Prison.” While her essay describes a grim side of the Afghan family in crisis,* she writes urgently in response to the Save the Children attack about how tragic news like this may contribute to a "lost cause" mentality and negatively impact policy-making here in the United States.

How We See Afghanistan Matters

Esther Hyneman

I am in the process of making a documentary about progress in Afghanistan. Although the country has a long way to go, describing its shortcomings does more harm to the country than good. Americans get their ideas about Afghanistan from the media, which is addicted to the sensational and the negative. Recently, the New York Times published an article about a young girl who had spent all eleven years of her life in prison with her serial killer mother. It is a terrible story, but the article contained information that was slanted in an even more negative way, making it almost dishonest. It failed to explain that this was an unusual case—or why it was unusual. The article claimed that there were more than one-thousand Afghan children living in prisons with their mothers. In fact, most children over five years old are removed from prisons and put in Children's Support Centers—resident and educational centers—run by Women for Afghan Women (WAW).

A few weeks after this upsetting New York Times piece was published, the reporter Rod Nordland published a second article that describes the children's support centers that were omitted from his original story. However, I would argue that the first article did significant damage. In fact, he called the Children's Support Centers—a name WAW chose very carefully—orphanages.

I am so upset about how the media writes about Afghanistan that I am in the process of making a documentary on progress in that country. Watch the documentary trailer here. How many Americans are aware that there are highly capable, intelligent, and thoughtful Afghans dedicating their lives to solving their country's problems. I don't believe in lying about Afghanistan's problems, but writing about the current situation as if nothing positive is happening isn't exactly the truth.

Finally, we hear from human rights activist Lauryn Oates, who agrees that media coverage in the West greatly skews stories from Afghanistan and affirms stereotypes. She writes,

We shouldn’t see everything through rose-coloured glasses, but we can’t frame it as all doom and gloom or people will give up and check out. At Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan we have aimed to do that here. We acknowledge that progress has been made, but we also point out that persistent problems prevent further progress. It is a call to action. It is a reason to raise the rallying cry and work harder. I think that’s the key message those of us who care so much about Afghanistan need to get across.

Educating for Peace 

Lauryn Oates

In Afghanistan, violence is so common as to have literally become a part of day-to-day life. For the past decade, I have begun every single day by opening my email and reading through security incident reports for areas of the country where my organization is working. Some days there are 50 alerts, some days 20, but usually not less than five on any given day. The violence doesn’t pause for holidays or weekends. It happens mornings, afternoons, evenings and nights. It happens on the street, in stores, in restaurants, at home, at work, in the city, in the countryside. There are robberies, bombs, grenades, rocket attacks, small arms fire, kidnappings, attempted kidnappings, vehicle hijackings, and threats. Every day, lives are stolen: women, men, and children who are walking, dreaming, breathing people one moment, and gone the next. In the language of a report, they are reduced to the language where they can be categorized: casualties, killed, critical condition, injured, missing. There is no getting around it: eventually it numbs you. I skim them, read the aggregated data to look for patterns and changes in the areas where we work, file them away, and move on to the next task on my desk.

However, as the Japanese Buddhist priest Kobayashi Issa wrote after the death of his infant daughter,

This dewdrop world—
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet . . .

As a Buddhist, Issa was expected to strive for detachment from the material world. Death should be taken in stride, and not detract too much from meditating toward thoughts of nothingness. But his small daughter was dead, and the mourning crept over him. One cannot help but grieve.

Mahbooba stands against a bullet-ridden wall, waiting to be seen at a medical clinic. The seven-year-old girl suffers from leishmaniasis, a parasitical infection. Kabul, March 1, 2002. (Photo courtesy of Getty Images, from Paula Bronstein's book Afghanistan.)

In this same way, sometimes an “incident” cuts through the numbness, and gives pause. Such was this week’s attack on Save the Children's office in Jalalabad, in which four staff were killed and several others injured. Perhaps this reflection stems from working in the same sectoral space as them in the education field in the country, perhaps it is the organization's decades long track record of work in Afghanistan, or perhaps it is from recognizing the cowardice of attacking an organization that works explicitly to serve the youngest and most vulnerable of society. By attacking those who try to lift up the children of Afghanistan to a better life, this is also an attack on the future of the country—and its best prospects for an eventual peace.

Afghanistan is one of the world’s youngest countries demographically, with the majority of the population aged under 25 years. Its youthful population is the source of both its woes and hope. It is a younger population—thirsty for education, opportunity, and jobs—who are a potential destabilizer as they now finish high school in droves but do not always find a place in the country’s competitive public higher education system, or cannot secure a viable livelihood, especially in the countryside. As a result, many of them are migrating, both within the country and from it, with some not surviving the perilous journey across an ocean, and others arriving with the clothing on their back, having given everything they had to smugglers. High fertility rates mean many families have more mouths than they can feed, pushing children into child labour, and girls into early, forced marriage. On the other hand, this unsettled, kinetic population of youth are also the people driving change in the country. They are changing the face of government, they are connecting their country to the outside world through technology and entrepreneurship, they are stimulating an exciting new era of music and entertainment. In Afghanistan, you will find children skateboarding, running their own circus, and generally beating the odds, as they excel in their educations, rising above their lot in life and making it.

More children go to school today than at any other time in Afghanistan’s history. They are sitting at the helm of a dramatic, profound, and irreversible transformation. One thing I’ve learned in working in literacy education is that literacy is intergenerational: literate parents do not raise illiterate children. So, every child who acquires an education represents future descendants who will be educated, too. These kids who have made it to a classroom—amidst violence, poverty, and uncertainty—are the tide turners. They will midwife a very different society to come. They will teach, they will heal the sick, they will build, they will mediate, they will design, and they will plan. They will win, and they will end terrorism. They will reduce their country’s dependence on outsiders.

But first, for now, they need those outsiders. Organizations like Save the Children have given this powerful infusion that has allowed so many of these kids to rise above their circumstances. It is their relentless, dedicated work to the idea that kids everywhere deserve to be kids—to play, to learn, to survive—that has helped fuel this powerful antidote to violence that I think will eventually prevail in the country—allowing these children to take their country back from those who would seek to destroy it.

A grief hangs over me on this day thinking about the three staff and the volunteer working for Save the Children who lost their lives in a senseless act of violence for the crime of working on behalf of children. But over that grief towers my unbreakable hope in the future that Afghan kids will create, as well as my appreciation for those who have made it possible, like the Afghans and their international colleagues who work for Save the Children.

A woman in a white burqa enjoys an afternoon with her family feeding the white pigeons at the Blue Mosque. Mazar-e-Sharif, March 8, 2008. (Photo courtesy of Getty Images, from Paula Bronstein's book Afghanistan.)

Wahid Omar was born in Kabul and left Afghanistan shortly before the Soviet invasion in 1979. He lived in France as a political refugee until 1987 and received his PhD from the University of Colorado in 2010. He has worked in Afghanistan since 2001 in project development, implementation, and feasibility studies, and as an educational advisor for the United Nations Development Program, training university professors and building capacity at the University of Kabul. Under his leadership, forty-five projects have been implemented, ranging from school and community centers, teacher training, water improvement projects, and microlending to humanitarian aid and relief efforts. He has won many awards for his teaching and writing, and his work in collecting and preserving Afghan folklore has garnered the attention of the Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of Afghanistan: A Nation in Performance—A Comparative Study between Medieval France and Contemporary Afghanistan.

Esther Hyneman is a professor emeritus of English at Long Island University. She received her BA from Goucher College and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. She often spends about six months a year in Afghanistan.

Lauryn Oates is a human rights activist focused on education in conflict zones. It was in 1996 that, at age 14, Lauryn read a newspaper article describing the new regime in Afghanistan called the Taliban, and their treatment of women and girls. She wrote up a petition demanding that the world respond to the Taliban’s misogynist policies, and has continued this work ever since, working in close partnership with a variety of Afghan women’s organizations and international charities. Lauryn is currently Programs Director with Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, managing education projects including teacher training, village libraries, literacy classes, schools and training programs. Lauryn is a fierce proponent of the universalism of human rights, and frequently speaks out against cultural relativism and for global citizenship in the Canadian and international media. She is the recipient of several awards and distinctions, including a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal awarded by the province of BC in 2013. She holds a BA in international development (McGill University), an MA in human security (Royal Roads University) and a PhD in education (University of British Columbia), and teaches graduate students at the School of Humanitarian Studies at Royal Roads University. In 2008, The Globe & Mail named Lauryn as the first of Ten Canadians to Watch in 2009.

* In 2008, it was estimated that 226 children in Afghanistan were living with their incarcerated mothers, while at about the same period, the American Civil Liberties Union estimated that two hundred children were being held with their parents at one immigrant prison in the United States. Child Rights International Network, “Afghanistan: Children in Prison with Mothers,” Associated Press, August 4, 2008, http://www.crin.org/resources/infodetail.asp?id=18035, and “ACLU Challenges Illegal Detention of Immigrant Children Held in Prison-Like Conditions,” American Civil Liberties Union, March 6, 2007, http://www.aclu.org/immigrants-rights/aclu-challenges-illegal-detention-immigrant-children-held-prison-conditions. Of interest: Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds, and Ruby C. Tapia, eds., Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

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The Case Against Deporting 200,000 Salvadorans

By Erik Ching

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Co-author of Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2007), editor of Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador: A Memoir of Guerrilla Radio (2010), and author of Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory (UNC Press, 2016)

The United States's decision to revoke TPS (Temporary Protected Status) from some 200,000 Salvadorans living in the United States is morally repugnant. The gap between moral accountability and foreign policymaking is wide, even for a country like the United States, whose leaders’ idealistic rhetoric suggests otherwise. But if there was ever a country that owed another country something and one that should be held accountable to a moral standard, it is the United States in its historic relation with El Salvador.

The United States extended TPS to Salvadorans in 2001 after a series of devastating earthquakes. The Department of Homeland Security claims that the earthquake conditions that inspired TPS no longer apply, and thus Salvadorans can return home. Technically, that statement may be accurate, depending on how one chooses to define “earthquake conditions.” But the reality is that the situation in El Salvador has been deteriorating ever since, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for creating those conditions. The United States has had a deep impact on El Salvador in pursuit of its own foreign policy needs going back to the 1970s, and its actions contributed not only to the historic flow of migrants out of El Salvador, but also to the current conditions of violence that prevail there.

The United States had an overwhelming presence in El Salvador in the 1980s. Under the Carter administration, but especially during the two terms of Reagan's presidency, U.S. 

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policy makers defined El Salvador as a foreign policy priority after the Sandinista victory in neighboring Nicaragua in 1979. Although the United States suspended military aid to El Salvador in December 1980, after four U.S. churchwomen were killed by governmental security forces, it reinstated aid in January 1981 in response to the guerrillas' first “Final Offensive,” which more or less formally launched the Salvadoran civil war. Under the successive Reagan administrations, U.S. aid and the role of the United States increased steadily, particularly in 1983 and 1984 when it appeared that the Salvadoran government was on the verge of losing to the guerrillas. Overall, the United States provided on average $1 million per day of aid to the Salvadoran government throughout the 1980s, much of it in the form of military aid.

The justification for these policies was to prevent the supposedly Marxist guerrillas (the FMLN) from coming into power in El Salvador, as the FSLN had done in neighboring Nicaragua. Therein, U.S. policy makers tended to define the situation in El Salvador through the highly circumscribed and deeply flawed prism of the cold war, i.e. that the Salvadoran guerrillas lacked popular support and were a front for Soviet, Cuban, and/or Nicaraguan expansionist designs. One of the most definitive policy statements in this regard was Reagan’s address to the nation in May 1984 to appeal for support in providing more aid to El Salvador. In its framing of the situation in El Salvador and in standing by the Salvadoran government/military as steadfastly as it did, the United States prolonged the war and helped contribute to the brutal human rights record that the Salvadoran military accrued throughout the years.

With the benefit of hindsight and evidence, we now know definitively that the overwhelming majority of killing and human-rights violations being perpetrated in El Salvador were done by the Salvadoran military and/or paramilitary organizations with close military ties. What we also know now, but which we also knew at the time, is the large extent to which the United States either tacitly supported or willfully ignored the actions and activities of its allies on the ground in El Salvador, notably in events like the massacre of El Mozote in December 1981 (portrayed so clearly by the journalism of Mark Danner) and the assassination of the six Jesuits in November 1989, to list just two examples of countless others. Admittedly, at various times throughout the war, U.S. policy makers tried to get Salvadoran military leaders to amend their ways in the face of growing U.S. domestic opposition to the war, such as when Vice President Bush arrived in December 1983 and delivered a rather stern directive to the generals about cleaning up their act. But both sides recognized that the U.S. had planted its flag with the Salvadoran military and that it was unable and/or unwilling to do anything to jeopardize its cold-war inspired foreign policy initiatives in El Salvador. The killings and the torture went on, only beginning to abate after 1983.

In addition to the history of U.S. involvement during the civil war in the 1980s, the United States’s subsequent immigration policies have had adverse impacts on El Salvador, namely the deportations of Salvadorans in the 1990s and 2000s. Many scholars see these various kinds of deportation as giving rise to, or significantly contributing to, the explosion of gang membership and gang-related violence in El Salvador by entities such as MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) and Calle 18. Those gangs have their origins in the United States, as young migrants who fled from the violence of the 1980s became subsequently caught up in the desperation of life in the United States thereafter. Although some of the people that the United States deported back to El Salvador were gang members involved in criminal activity, the United States also sent back many young people, some of whom did not even speak Spanish and had no record of gang participation or criminality. When thrust into the alien environment of El Salvador, some of these young people could only find refuge within gangs, exacerbating the problem.

The overwhelming majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans currently residing in the United States on TPS are law-abiding people working diligently to make a better life for themselves, and therein contributing to the collective good. Throwing them back into El Salvador would be a human rights disaster. They will struggle to find their footing, they will be targeted for extortion, and their needs will be an added burden to a nation already short on employment. In 1969, some 100,000 Salvadoran peasants, living across the border in Honduras, were forced by the Honduran government to return to El Salvador en masse. This action helped trigger a subsequent war with Honduras, and the sudden return of this mass of Salvadorans also had a destabilizing effect on the nation’s society and economy, contributing to the downward spiral that led to the outbreak of civil war in 1980. I fear that the mass return of 200,000 Salvadorans from the United States in 2018 would have a similarly destabilizing effect, to say nothing of the consequences for many U.S. citizens who will be separated from their loved ones and family members.

Erik Ching is a Professor of History at Furman University.

Further reading: Erik Ching was quoted in a recent New York Times article with Gene Palumbo as lead author titled, "El Salvador Again Feels the Hand of Washington Shaping Its Fate."

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The story behind Joseph Skibell’s 'Six Memos from the Last Millennium'

Joseph Skibell is renowned as a critically acclaimed and prize-winning novelist, the author of such genre-defying works as A Blessing on the Moon and A Curable Romantic. Critics have called him “a major talent” (Publishers Weekly) whose “gifted, committed imagination” (New York Times) has produced works that are “always a joy to read” (Jerusalem Report). His new book is nothing short, while also a bit of a departure. Entitled Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud, it’s an elegantly written literary investigation into

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the tales of the Talmud – the great repository of ancient wisdom that is the foundation text, along with the Bible, of Rabbinic Judaism. (The Talmud’s composition dates roughly from between 200 and 500 CE.) This new work is no less genre-defying. Part fiction, part exegesis, part speculative theology, the book is, above all, a love letter to art of storytelling. And in its pages, Skibell looks at these old stories from the vantage of a modern novelist in order to find their relevance for readers today.

A Childlike Love of Stories, the Essence of Human Life
The story behind Joseph Skibell’s Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud

Can you tell us a little about the history of this project?

Well, that’s a great question. As I explain in the book’s introduction, some years ago, I was taking a Talmud class at an Orthodox synagogue. I was raised in a Reform community, so the Talmud was like a vast, unmapped world for me. About 4/5th of the Talmud is dedicated to – let’s call them – the theo-legal discussions of the Sages. Rabbinic Judaism is a religion of laws – what’s permitted, what’s forbidden – and the Talmudic Sages devote a kind of scientific rigor to deciphering the will of the Creator as it has been revealed in the pages of the Torah.

The other fifth of the Talmud, though, is the legendary parts: the stories of the Sages’ lives, tall tales, myths, legends. As a fiction writer, I was drawn to these stories, of course, but my teachers tended to skip over them or hurry past them, and they were given none of the time and attention, the almost scientific dissection, the legal parts of the Talmud were given. And so I decided to study them on my own, in a kind of openhearted, open-minded way, taking them at face value and seeing what they were really all about.

And what did you discover?

Well, first of all, I discovered that there’s a genius afoot in the Talmud, a dramatist with a kind of Shakespearean scope. This, I should say, is just my way of talking about these things. Originally, the Talmud was an oral law, and one spanning many generations. So it’s the work of many tongues and many hands – you can’t literally speak of an author – but the little stories and tales in it are all, curiously enough, dramatic in form.

Meaning?

Meaning that, like scenes in a play, they all take place in “real time.” They’re made out of dialogue and action. With very few exceptions, there’s no interiority in these stories, so if people in these tales want to think, they have to speak aloud, just like characters in a play. The narrative descriptions are mostly simple, physical actions, not unlike a playwright’s stage direction. I started by gathering all the stories and story fragments that had to do with the same figures or constellations of figures, and what I found is that each piece sort of illuminated the other pieces, and if you brought them all together, they formed a larger narrative or a more complete drama. And then I realized that you could approach these “scenes” as an actor or a director or a writer might, asking questions like, “What’s this person’s motivation?” or “Why would he say this?” or “Why would he do this?” or “What is he thinking here?”

It’s a different way of thinking about sacred text, and in my experience, it was a very fruitful approach. 

Year End Round Up of Best Books

End of year best-of lists are everywhere this month. We've had a great year and are very proud of the lists our books have landed on thus far. Help us celebrate another great year in publishing!

Holiday shopping note: Order by next Thursday, December 17, to guarantee domestic delivery by December 25.

End of Year Round Up

“Best Of” or “Gifts” Lists

New York Times Sunday Book Review Holiday issue

The Jemima Code
Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks
By Toni Tipton-Martin

"The Jemima Code is no ordinary book. It’s a heaping helping, a long overdue acknowledgment of African-Americans who have toiled in this field since the country’s beginnings. With eloquence and urgency, Tipton-Martin makes the case that without the people of the African diaspora not only would America’s food be different, so would its culinary conversation." 

—The New York Times Book Review

Variations on a Rectangle
Thirty Years of Graphic Design from Texas Monthly to Pentagram
By DJ Stout

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The best photography books of 2015

Frame
A Retrospective
By Mark Cohen 

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NPR, Best Books 2015

The Jemima Code
Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks
By Toni Tipton-Martin

"[The Jemima Code is] that rare coffee table book that serves up important history and compelling imagery in digestible, bite-size chunks that still stick to your ribs." 

—Michel Martin, NPR's Best Books of 2015

Don’t Suck Don’t Die
Giving Up Vic Chesnutt
By Kristin Hersh

"Don't Suck, Don't Die is not only one of the best books of the year, it's one of the most beautiful rock memoirs ever written. Hersh is as stunningly talented an author as she is a musician, and her portrayal of Chesnutt is perfectly done." 

—NPR's Best Books of 2015

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Wall Street Journal, Best Books for Photography Lovers 2015

Frame
A Retrospective
By Mark Cohen 

"Mr. Cohen’s pictures are remarkable." 

—The Wall Street Journal

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American Photo, Best Books 2015

Frame
A Retrospective
By Mark Cohen

Political Abstraction
By Ralph Gibson

Remembering Photographer Mary Ellen Mark

A giant of the photography world has passed. We were fortunate enough to have worked with Mary Ellen Mark and the Wittliff Collections on a book of her photographs from India and Mexico, Man and Beast. She had such kind words to say about her experience publishing with us that we feel as if we've lost a loyal friend.

Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015)
Image from Man and Beast

Here is fellow Magnum photographer Eli Reed (A Long Walk Home) on Mary Ellen Mark:

I heard of Mary Ellen Mark's passing late today with some shock and sadness. She was and is one of the foundations of true photojournalism in a time that needed her kind of important additions to what is needed to tell important stories with truth, beauty, and a healthy respect for her subjects. 

They were not just subjects. Many became friends that stayed in touch with her throughout her life. The dimming of her light is an extremely important loss at this time in photographic history. There are so many well meaning professionals and amateurs who have tried to copy the work of photographers that possibly inhabit the same space that she lived in and the well meaning failed for the most part. 

One needed to have the same kind of faith in your own original vision that Mary Ellen Mark displayed time after time. It seems too many photographers did not get that very important memo. Particularly the part of that memo that tells you to get ready for failure so that when victory comes—it will be as sweet as a Georgia peach. 

Mary Ellen could have been a very tough US Marine if she had somehow and for some reason thought to go in that direction but fortunately for the rest of us—she chose the path of being as gentle as the sweetest kiss from a Summer's sweet breeze celebrating the coming of a sultry night. 

Mary Ellen Mark was a magnificent human being who gave, through the work she produced, much more then she received and I mourn her passing. She was a special kind of a living day and night that brings to the front very beautiful mornings. Sweets dreams to her is a good thing.

Read Mary Ellen in conversation with Melissa Harris, editor-in-chief of Aperture Foundation, and Martin Bell, Mark's husband, former politician, and British UNICEF Ambassador, in this excerpt from Man and Beast.

UT Press Book at the Heart of New, Award-Winning Documentary

In this week’s New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott reviews Treva Wurmfeld’s new documentary “Shepard & Dark” under the headline, “Two Writers Bound By Decades of Letters.” The film depicts the decades-long friendship between Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark. As Scott says,“Through it all, they wrote letters full of loose-limbed philosophizing, emotional candor and gruff wit. Those letters, which fill cartons and binders, provide the movie with its premise.” These letters now reside at the Wittliff Collection in San Marcos, Texas (the transference of which is also depicted in the film) and they will be published by UT Press for the first time in Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark, available on October 15.

Sam Shepard, Johnny Dark, and their 40-odd years of friendship are fascinating. Their lives are unique case studies in modern masculinity, as both men struggled with loyalty, love, fame, and the nurturance of an independent creative drive. Sam and Johnny began their friendship in Greenwich Village in the 60s and stayed friends through unconventional living arrangements in 1970s San Francisco, Shepard’s rising fame in the 1980s, and the dramatic start to his relationship with actress Jessica Lange. Both the film and the book are deeply personal, and given Shepard’s commitment to privacy, also provide the best opportunity to understand the life behind one of America’s greatest living playwrights.

Film screenings

On October 10, The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX, hosts filmmaker Treva Wurmfeld and Johnny Dark for a screening and panel discussion of “Shepard & Dark.” Read more about the Sam Shepard collection.

The film comes to Austin on October 11, screening at the Violet Crown: http://www.violetcrowncinema.com/movies.php?bit=coming_soon

Watch the trailer of “Shepard & Dark,” released by Music Box Films:

Announcing a Major Publishing Initiative: The Texas Bookshelf

The University of Texas Press announces a major new initiative unprecedented in publishing—The Texas Bookshelf. This project will be the most ambitious and comprehensive publishing endeavor about the culture and history of one state ever undertaken. The Texas Bookshelf will comprise sixteen books and a companion website launching in 2017, all to be written by the distinguished faculty at The University of Texas at Austin. The first book will be a new full-length history of Texas, followed by fifteen books released over five years on a range of Texas subjects—politics, music, film, business, architecture, and sports, among many others. (Authors and subjects listed below)

The Texas Bookshelf authors.
Photo by Michael O’Brien (Hard Ground, 2011)

John Steinbeck wrote in his 1962 book Travels with Charley: In Search of America, “I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.” Texas has long been a source of international fascination for writers, thinkers, musicians, artists, and innovators alike. This vast and varied state occupies a unique and sometimes controversial place in conversations about our nation’s cultural, economic, and political history, yet at the same time embodies something essential about the American experience. Today’s Texas, like America itself, is vital and diverse, a place whose rich heritage and Wild West romanticism are constantly being recombined with its modern entrepreneurial spirit, reflected in its personalities and national politicians—including three U.S. presidents—and the global boom industries of film, music, high tech, energy, and the growing sustainability movement. 

Drawing on the state’s brightest writers, scholars, and intellectuals, the engagingly written narratives of the Texas Bookshelf will reveal the many fascinating stories that have played out in Texas from pre-Columbian times to the twenty-first century.

Director of Princeton University Press Peter Dougherty calls the project “inspired” and says, “The Bookshelf is ambitious in aim, authoritative in authorship, and panoramic in scope. I think it brilliantly merges the resources of the University of Texas with a vision as big as Texas itself. The Bookshelf sets a new standard and establishes a new genre for university presses and publishers everywhere.”

Publicity Round Up

With the heat of summer upon us, Robb Walsh and O. Rufus Lovett's barbecue joint adventure is catching fire. Check out the attention that Barbecue Crossroads — and other UT Press books — are getting this season.

• Publishers Weekly listed Barbecue Crossroads as a 'Standout Barbecue Book.' See the list at publishersweekly.com>> 
• Booklist gave the book a starred review. Read it on booklistonline.com>>
• Robb Walsh was pegged as "The Steinbeck of the South" in the Dallas Morning News. Read the article on dallasnews.com>>
• Houston Chronicle's Greg Morago says of the book, "Throughout this smoked-meat hegira Walsh lavishes Southern barbecue lore and history like he’s building an especially luscious pulled-pork sandwich. The stories and recipes he coaxes from these keepers of the flame are what make “Barbecue Crossroads” such a tasty journey.” Read the rest on houstonchronicle.com>>
• Russ Parsons of the Los Angeles Times on reading Barbecue Crossroads: "In the end, you feel privileged to have been invited along and a whole lot smarter about not only smoked meat in all of its many guises, but this lovely and confounding part of the country.” More on latimes.com>>
• A prominent mention in a list of new cookbooks from the New York Times. See the list on nytimes.com>>

Photojournalists and authors Michael Kamber and Donna De Cesare continue to garner widespread attention for their projects:

• The BBC interviewed Michael Kamber about his book Photojournalists on War. Watch on bbc.co.uk>> 
• Kamber talks to the Washington Post's 'The Fold' about the stories behind the images. Watch the video on washingtonpost.com>>
•  Austin Merrell of Vanity Fair says of the book, "Kamber's interviews with his colleagues cover the war as they saw it—their passion for the story, their fears and daily complications, and the trauma they live with still today. Some of their images are among the most iconic of the war, some are previously unpublished..." View the slideshow and article on vanityfair.com>>
• Michael Kamber appeared on the Leonard Lopate Show to promote the book. Listen to the interview on wnyc.org>> 
• CBSnews.com featured a slideshow with interview excerpts from contributing photographers. See it on cbsnews.com>>
• Mike Sacks on HuffPost Live digs deeper into the photojournalist's experience in Iraq with Michael Kamber. Watch it on live.huffingtonpost.com>> 
• KPCC Radio, NPR's affiliate station in Pasadena, CA, interviewed Donna De Cesare about her book Unsettled/Desasosiego. Listen to the interview on scpr.org>>