prophetic voices

John Richard Hersey, son of China missionaries, was perhaps able to bring a personal history of growing up in Asia to an unimaginable event in terms and tones that are both haunting and yet accessible. His story carries a quiet, deep respect for the Japanese victims, a humanizing story of their lives that brings them immediately and intimately to life. This is part of the power of his telling, which appeared as an article in The New Yorker in 1946. Doctors, secretaries, seamstress, mothers, priests, soldiers, and urban mix of everyday lives carry this cautionary tale.

I will admit that when I had finished Sam Harris’s The End of Faith I understood the urge to ban and burn books. I had never read anything so bigoted, inciting, wrong-headed, even evil, before in my life. Chris Hedges, however, has been more methodical in his response, shredding Harris’s positions (and those of his fellow atheists), in a powerful, challenging, and dark but honest pragmatism.

The nexus of the coming summer Olympic Games and the weather catastrophes of recent months in China and Burma have opened a new window of curiosity and interest to the issues of Buddhism, Democracy, Globalization, Compassion and Spiritual leadership. Few are bettered positioned to provide insights than Iyer who met the Dalai Lama through visits with his father when a child and whose curiosity about the “East” has sustained him as a writer for decades, include frequent circlings through the presence of the Dalai Lama and Dharmasala.

I am particularly impressed with the passion, dedication, and capacity of so many FOR members to invest themselves in research and publication at their own expense. I look forward to reviewing a number of such pieces over the summer.

As someone personally entering treatment for cancer (prostate, early detection, virtually fully curable), I was perhaps more readily drawn to Mott’s metaphor than I would have been otherwise. But our culture and times, between the aging of boomers, the advertising empire of pharmaceutical companies, and the political issues of health care, mean we are all familiar with much medical terminology, so the language works to make Mott’s case.

This is a voice from the beyond; a collection of speeches, stories, sketches of Vonnegut’s on war and peace, never before published. That Vonnegut survived the fire bombing of Dresden, but was required to clean up after it, as a prisoner of war certainly offers a contextual frame for his contributions to literature and his lifelong, self-proclaimed “disgust with civilization.” With good reason, and much evidence to support his case.

Russell Banks, a novelist I have long admired and enjoyed reading, makes a bold and stunning entry into the field of political analysis and progressive prophetic voice with Dreaming Up America. The text is a series of commentary on classic American films, collected for a French audience initially, and now issued as a collection of essays rather than a script. Two extended quotations may whet your appetite enough to acquire a copy for yourself, read, and pass on to others.