The Long Trail behind You
Shirin Ebadi, with Azadeh Moaveni, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope But a personal story is more powerful than any dry summary of why a given law should be changed. To attract people’s…
Category: Activists
Share the Wealth with Sarah Dwidar: The Successes and Failures of International Justice and Human Rights Mechanisms
Despite the prevalence of international criminal law and human rights law in our modern geopolitical discourse, both fields are in their infancy – international accountability finding its roots in the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the…
“Using Hatred to Fight Hatred Is the Surest Way to Create Even More Hatred”
Thich Nhat Hanh, Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change Immediately before I read this book by Nhat Hanh, I read David Grossman on the advances in psychology to get us to kill, to…
We’ll Always Have Berkeley
Letter/3 (Dissidents/4) —The Book of Mev In August 1995 as Mev and I were getting settled in our new home in St. Louis, we learned that Steve Kelly had been arrested for a Plowshares action…
We’ll Always Have Berkeley
Letter/3 (Dissidents/4) —The Book of Mev In August 1995 as Mev and I were getting settled in our new home in St. Louis, we learned that Steve Kelly had been arrested for a Plowshares action…
“Show Me Your American Buddha”
Thich Nhat Hanh’s Being Peace was published 31 years years ago, and it remains fresh, challenging, and practical. While there are thousands of books on Buddhism, this short text of 115 pages, graced with the…
Books To Read before We Die
Recently, I gave a bibliophilic friend the new book by James Mustich, 1,000 Books To Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List. It is a delight to peruse the tome, as the author and his…
Share the Wealth 2018
Thanks to my/our friends–those who shared with us, those who hosted, and those who came, opened, and listened. Like my student Anlin, I’m one of the richest people around. Harvest in Occupied Palestine: Lea Koesterer…
Knowing and Not Knowing the Global American Berserk
Philip Roth, American Pastoral Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997 …the angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were fugitive—initiating the Swede…
A U.S. American Voice, Laotian Voices
Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War (first published in 1972) If our country had decency, at the death of Fred Branfman there would have been coverage, interviews, retrospectives,…