Amy Adamczyk

Amy Adamczyk is the author of Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality: Examining Attitudes across the Globe. From her Q&A with the John Jay Research blog:

LL: Tell us about your book, Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality. What sparked your motivation for such a project, both in terms of the subject matter and methodology but also in terms of taking on such a large endeavor? Have you always seen yourself as wanting to write a book? What are you most exited about and what are some of the key take-aways?

AA: Public opinion about homosexuality varies substantially around the world. While residents in some nations have embraced gay rights as human rights, people in many other countries find homosexuality unacceptable. In the book I use survey data from almost ninety societies, case studies of various countries, content analysis of newspaper articles, and in-depth interviews to examine how individual and country characteristics influence acceptance of homosexuality. The survey data show that cross-national differences in opinion can be explained by three primary factors -the strength of democratic institutions, the level of economic development, and the religious context of the places where people live. The world’s poorest, least democratic and most religious countries are more likely to have laws that punish same-sex sexual behaviors and have a high proportion of residents who disapprove of homosexuality. While the United States has high levels of economic development and a strong democracy, it has been slower to change its laws and attitudes about homosexuality than some of its European counterparts, in part, because the US is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Marina Budhos

Marina Budhos is the author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction. Her novels for young adults are Tell Us We’re Home and Ask Me No Questions. Her nonfiction books include Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers and Sugar Changed the World, which she cowrote with her husband, Marc Aronson.

Budhos's latest novel is Watched.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Watched, and for your main character, Naeem?

A: I had been noodling around for quite a while with an idea of doing a “companion” book to Ask Me No Questions, which is about an undocumented Bangladeshi family in the wake of 9/11.

Many of my readers had asked me if I would do a sequel, but one, I don’t do that kind of thing, and two, it didn’t feel true to the book, which is intentionally left open-ended. But I knew I wanted to return to this world, and what I see as the next “beat” in this post 9/11 world, particularly for Muslim teenagers.

Then one evening I was out with a friend and she told me the story of a young man who came into her law office who was boasting and hinting that while his father was a shopkeeper in Jackson Heights, he was “in the know with the powers that be” as an informant. This completely fascinated me—the idea that he felt empowered, but apparently also trapped--and the novelist in me began to spin with a story.

I learned just enough about surveillance and sting operations and then focused on Naeem—a well-meaning kid, who...[read on]

Visit Marina Budhos's website.

My Book, The Movie: Watched.

The Page 69 Test: Watched.

Writers Read: Marina Budhos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Rooney

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches English and Creative Writing at DePaul University and is the author of eight books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including the novel O, Democracy! (Fifth Star Press, 2014) and the novel in poems Robinson Alone (Gold Wake Press, 2012). With Eric Plattner, she is the co-editor of René Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016 and Alma Books, 2016). A winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine, her reviews and criticism have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Magazine, The Rumpus, The Nation, the Poetry Foundation website and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay.

Rooney's new book, her second novel, is Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.

From Rooney's Q&A with Adam Morgan at the Chicago Review of Books:

Adam Morgan: What does flânerie mean to you personally? How has it impacted your writing and your relationship with Chicago?

Kathleen Rooney: Walking saves my life every day. It’s one of my favorite things to do in the world, simultaneously so basic and (ha) pedestrian, but also magical and transcendent. I despise cars (so bad for our health, our earth, and our society), but I adore mapping a place with my feet. Physically and emotionally, walking feels right to me in a way that being in a vehicle never, ever does.

I love the opportunities to read the city like a book in super-close detail—walking is near and slow enough to do that. And I love the chance encounters with people and places you get on foot that you don’t quite get from other forms of transportation, even on a bike (which I say as someone who also likes to bicycle around the city).

Chicago is a tough city to walk, I can’t lie, because it’s so huge and spread out, and because its neighborhoods are so unevenly resourced. But those are some of the reasons I love to walk here. My flaneur friend and DePaul colleague Eric Plattner and I often set out early in the morning and walk from 9 am to 5 pm, covering 10 miles, 12 miles, 15 miles. And doing that—traversing so many different landscapes—teaches you things about a city and the people in it, as well as its history and future. Who has power and who lacks it, who is remembered and who is forgotten, who is thriving, who is struggling—all of those things about who is at the margins and who is at the center.

I wish Rahm Emanuel would take more walks. I think...[read on]

Visit Kathleen Rooney's website.

The Page 99 Test: Live Nude Girl.

The Page 99 Test: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.

My Book, The Movie: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.

My Book, The Movie: Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.

Writers Read: Kathleen Rooney.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Minnich

Elizabeth Minnich is the author of The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You begin your book with Hannah Arendt. What do you see as the similarities and differences between her phrase "the banality of evil" and your formulation of "the evil of banality"?

A: Well, first, there's a rhetorical difference. I know that may not seem important, but people's first reactions to the two phrases have been startlingly different.

When Arendt took me with her to public discussions of her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil, some who attended were painfully angered by the very idea that evil – in this case, the undeniable evil of the Holocaust – could be associated at all with "banality."

No, no: it has to be monstrous, and the man, Eichmann, on trial for his effective participation in making genocide possible, had to be in a sense worthy of it by being monstrous himself.

I wondered then if more people might be able and willing to hear what Arendt was actually saying better if she had spoken of "the evil of banality," which inflates "banality" by association, rather than seeming to deflate "evil." It turns out it works.

Asking people to think with me about the searing question that drives this book -- How is it actually possible to do horrific harm to others day after day after day, as the close-in perpetrators of extensive evils such as genocide, enslavement, child prostitution, life-distorting economic exploitation indeed do? – surely asks me in turn to speak in ways that invite minds to stay open.

And that matters a lot: understandably, we want to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua Kurlantzick

Joshua Kurlantzick is a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been a correspondent in Southeast Asia for The Economist, a columnist for Time, the foreign editor of The New Republic, a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. He has written about Asia for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to The New York Times Magazine. He is the winner of the Luce Scholarship and was selected as a finalist for the Osborn Elliot prize, both for journalism in Asia.

Kurlantzick's new book is A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA.

From the transcript of his interview with Fresh Air's Dave Davies:

DAVIES: So around in 1960, when the United States began to consider a more active role in the conflict in Laos, the U.S. had a guy on the ground there for years already, a CIA operative named Bill Lair. Tell us about him.

KURLANTZICK: In '60 and early '61, he had already been involved in doing some work in Laos. And he saw that the Laos war was going to get larger. And he believed that the United States had a role to play, but that that role had to be that the CIA and the United States in general should be arming and training local fighters, mostly of the Hmong ethnic group, because they had proven to be the most effective fighters, but that this operation he had kind of sketched out in the back of his mind had to be one in which the U.S. was not at the forefront.

The U.S. was the provider of arms. The U.S. was the trainer, I should say the CIA, mostly. But it was going to be the Hmong Laotians' war. It was going to be their war to protect their land, their war to protect their pretty nascent sense of democracy. But it was going to be the United States behind them, and these sort of local leaders pushing it. And the reason for that is because the more that you identified the U.S. with the war, the more you ran the risk - which had happened before in Vietnam with the French, and has happened many, many times - that the war would be perceived to be an American war. And Bill Lair did not want that. He wanted it to be a Hmong, a Laotian nation war where the U.S. helped.

DAVIES: So Bill Lair had this deep relationship with the Hmong people, these people that lived in these - this rugged territory in central Laos and were prepared to fight. They had a charismatic leader, a guy named Vang Pao. Tell us about him.

KURLANTZICK: He had basically spent his entire life, since his childhood, doing nothing but war. He worked with other older Hmong people when he was just a teenager to help fight off the Japanese who had taken over part of Laos. He had then started fighting with...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Serhii Plokhy

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University. A three-time recipient of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies prize, his books include Yalta: The Price of Peace, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, and the recently released The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story. The Man with the Poison Gun focuses on KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky, who defected to West Germany in 1961, and his trial.

From Plokhy's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you research the book, and what surprised you most?

A: The core was the proceedings of the trial, where the story was told. The idea was to look at whether it was true, and [place] it in a broader context of the Cold War. Today people have to be reminded of what that was—that was the task, placing it into Cold War history from Washington to Bonn to Moscow.

The killing and the revelation that came after had international repercussions. It changed the way clandestine war was waged by the KGB, and the impact was huge on the situation in Western Germany, when Nazi criminals were put on trial, they were trying to use the Stashinsky defense, an accessory to murder rather than perpetrators.

That was the context, the broader impact of what happened, the result of the assassination going public.

Q: So can you say more about the legacy of Stashinsky’s actions, and the impact on the Cold War?

A: He was able to convince judges and the public that the order to kill two leaders of a radical Ukrainian [organization] came from the top of the Soviet Party apparatus. In 1962, it was the height of Cold War tensions, and he was testifying it was the head of the KGB [who was involved].

[At the same time] the head of the KGB was promoted—he became the head of the Central Committee, Aleksandr Shelepin. He was the main rival of Brezhnev. Once they removed Khrushchev in 1964, people believed Brezhnev [was temporary] and Shelepin was the real power behind the throne.

He linked [this leader] with potential killings, and it caused...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jarett Kobek

Jarett Kobek is the author of I Hate the Internet. From his Guardian Q&A with Carole Cadwalladr:

So, do you actually hate the internet, Jarett?

Not particularly. There’s part of it that I find really contemptible. The title is offered like the sneer of a 15-year-old into Twitter, after they’ve just seen a meme of someone having sex with a chicken or something. I hate parts of it. I certainly think it’s been enormously detrimental to society.

You seem particularly down on Twitter.

It’s not Twitter per se. It’s the undue amount of importance that very serious people put on Twitter. That, to me, is what’s infuriating. It’s a social network that makes everyone sound like a 15-year-old and then very serious people take it way too seriously. And that’s not how to run a society. That’s not how to effect change.

You say: “One of the curious aspects of the 21st century was the great delusion… that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were best exercised on technological platforms owned by corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible.” And yet you’re not exempt from that: your novel is available as an ebook…

Ah...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Haskell

Molly Haskell's new biography is Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You write, “I had never been an ardent fan” of Steven Spielberg’s work. Why was that, and did your work on this book change your opinion?

A: I think because he was working in fantasy and genres that didn’t appeal to me—thrillers, Jaws. I have come to think of Jaws differently, maybe not E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

It was a challenge. I was not sympathetic to these genres. What turned me into a movie nut was European films. He and George Lucas were [going in a different direction]. Directors [had been] making European-style movies with Hollywood movies, and the nature of film production was changing.

[There was a move] into summer hits and blockbusters, and Steven Spielberg seemed responsible for that. That’s why I wasn’t a fan, though some of his later films, I did like some and liked them even better as I wrote the book…

Q: You opted to tell his story through his films. Why did you choose that approach?

A: [Spielberg has said] all my life is in my films. That’s how I wanted to tell the story. I looked forward to the opportunity of seeing the films again.

That leads to the question, Did I ...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Elliot Ackerman

Elliot Ackerman's new novel is Dark at the Crossing.

From the transcript of his interview with NPR's Scott Simon:

SIMON: Where does the character of Haris come from? In your own experience?

ACKERMAN: You know, I think he's a man of two identities. He is an Iraqi born in Iraq but a naturalized American citizen. And he's someone who stands in conflict with himself. He feels a draw back to that part of the world, specifically what's going on in Syria, you know, a cause that he feels, at least at face value, is just, meaning fighting for democratic reforms in that country - you know, as opposed to the experience he had had in his own country, fighting alongside the Americans in a war that he felt to be unjust. So, you know, he's a conflicted person.

SIMON: Do romance and revolution get all mixed up in your experience?

ACKERMAN: You know, absolutely. The person Haris meets, Amir, who is a Syrian refugee and a former activist in the revolution, is stranded in this border town, which is a place called Gaziantep, which today is a real crossroads for anyone engaged in the Syrian civil war. And Amir's there with his wife, Daphne. And as you quickly learn, they...[read on]

Visit Elliot Ackerman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Green on Blue.

Writers Read: Elliot Ackerman (February 2015).

My Book, The Movie: Green on Blue.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Rivers

Susan Rivers is the author of The Second Mrs. Hockaday. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You note that your novel was based on a real incident. Why did you decide to write a novel based on this incident, and how did you balance the historical and fictional aspects of the book?

A: This may sound far-fetched, but I don't actually "decide" that I'm going to write about a particular topic or event. I hear or see something or visit some place with intense atmosphere and -- wham -- the creative part of my brain, the part that spins stories, revs up and tells me to start writing or get left in the dust.

That's how it happened with the book I'm working on now, about a textile mill town at the turn of the century. I saw one of Lewis Hines' photos from his child labor series, taken when he went undercover in the early 1900s.

It shows a lint-covered child standing at the window of the spinning room where she was working 11 to 16 hours a day, in a mill only a few miles from my home.

I had to leave the slide show at UNC Chapel Hill and collect myself, because the slide caused me to spurt tears like a busted boiler. I knew I was going to tell that child's "story."

It was the same with The Second Mrs. Hockaday, my book that came out Jan. 10. Back in 2014 I was teaching summer school at the local college and had some time to revisit notes I'd made a year earlier on a possible story idea about the Civil War.

I went to the tiny library near my home to look through the jumble of historical material they have and I stumbled across the summary of an 1865 inquest. As soon as I read it, I knew this was a story begging to be told in novel-form.

A Confederate soldier who had been away from his teen-aged wife for four years arrived home at war's end to confront rumors that his bride had become pregnant while he was away. It was alleged that she had given birth to a son who had been killed and buried on their farm. The baby's remains were unearthed and the angry husband pushed to have his wife indicted for murder.

For her part the young woman refused to speak about the baby, to name the father, or to explain how he was conceived. She maintained this silence for the rest of her life, even though she and her husband eventually reconciled.

I was electrified by the plight of this young woman and by...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue